George Will Must Not Think Willie Mays Was a Great Baseball Player or that the Polio Vaccine Was a Big Deal

That is the implication of his column touting the virtues of inequality. Will seems to think that we could not get people to work hard to master skills or to be great innovators if they didn't have the prospect of earning billions or tens of billions of dollars. But if we look back through history we can identify an enormous number of tremendously talented and creative individuals who did not get fabulously wealthy or even have any plausible hope of getting fabulously wealthy.

Mays was of co...