Consider the following comments on inequality.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Abraham Lincoln
Some degree of inequality is the engine of effort, for no one strains to climb a ladder whose rungs are all level.
Inequality of outcome is tolerable only where there was first equality of chance, and there almost never is.
Wealth concentrated past a certain point stops being a reward for merit and starts being a wall against everyone else.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that the problem is not inequality as such but inequality that calcifies, hardening from a spur to effort into an inherited barrier. Open by conceding the meritocratic point, that some difference in reward motivates work and innovation, and perfect levelling would be both impossible and dispiriting. Then complicate it: large gaps in outcome distort the equality of opportunity that supposedly justifies them, since the children of the rich start several rungs up the ladder. A useful third move distinguishes inequality earned within a fair contest from inequality inherited before the contest begins. Caution: resist the lazy conclusion that any redistribution is theft, which mistakes the rules of a particular game for the laws of nature.