by John A. Jackson

Should it bother you that the level of economic inequality is higher in the United States than in any other industrialized nation? Should it nag at your civic conscience that the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily for 30 years?

It depends on what kind of country you want.

Alexander Stille, writing in the December 15 New York Times, notes that most economists dismiss the problem. Incomes are set by market forces; if the market thinks Katie Couric is a thousand times more valuable than you are, well, the market is always right. Sort of like God, for economists.

But the difficulty, as Stille continues, is that economic inequalities have other effects.

For example, Abraham Lincoln told us that the United States was "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

If inequality in wealth produces political inequality, is a point reached where that commitment has been betrayed? Have we reached that point already?

And socially -- no child chooses his or her parents. If inherited economic inequalities produce unequal outcomes regardless of a child's capabilities, character or talent, how can we possibly say that all children begin on a level field?

If some start and finish way ahead, then how can they all be equal? Equal in what way? As citizens?

But if financial inequality breeds political inequality, if money talks and the poor desert a political process deaf to their needs, then aren't we failing as a democracy? Doesn't increasing inequality breed that very deafness in our leaders?

When John McCain says campaign finance reform is the top of the nation's political agenda, he is not wrong -- but money already so controls the process that he is not electable, either.

We have the best government and the best legal system that money can buy, and it has.

If reforms would reduce the inequality, you can be sure they will not be enacted. Not without a major economic collapse, which no one wants.

Nor is this an American problem only. Inequality started to grow in Britain, for example, well before Margaret Thatcher made it politically fashionable. Inequality is growing more slowly in such countries as Germany and France only because their governments have thrown their weight against it. But it grows nevertheless.

What are governments created to do? To insure economic and personal security, and to distribute the products of the earth and of human labor.

Will a government of, by and for the rich behave in a just and acceptable manner? Will it care for all the people, or for fewer and fewer as times goes by?

Look around you and, if you are honest, you will see the answer.

In the United States, public investments are habitually slighted in favor of the private and the profitable.

The economic growth of the Fifties and Sixties occurred largely because that generation of young adults, the "Greatest Generation" and its children, was far better educated than its parents had been. Women and the racial minorities were also much better integrated into the economic process than ever before. Peace and political stability helped, too, while they lasted.

This generation of young adults is not better educated than its parents. Nor do large pools of the talented and disadvantaged lurk at the economic margins, waiting to be ushered in, as women were.

So yes, I am worried. This nation's fidelity to its promise is as important to me as my life, and I feel it draining day by day away. (To be continued.)