Equality vs. efficiency.

Twenty years ago, I was hunkered down in a classroom at Columbia University, surrounded by a half-hundred wannabe moguls intent on earning their Ivy League MBAs from the Graduate School of Business. I, on the other hand, was hiding out.

I had fled Winston-Salem, where I had been involved in an aborted effort to unionize the newsroom at the paper I worked for. My ticket to New York had been a Walter Bagehot (now Knight-Bagehot) Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism. I took perverse pride in the fact that my sojourn was underwritten by major corporations -- the anarcho-syndicalist asp cradled in the bosom of capitalism.

Of course, that kind of pudd'nhead logic, heavy on the romance without any leavening of reality, is the stuff of youth. But since I had already turned 30, I can't claim that excuse. I was never a threat to the paper -- which quite frankly didn't give a damn that I had left or, for that matter, might return from my leave of absence to cause more mischief -- much less to the free-enterprise system. But this, I knew, was a perfect opportunity to understand how the other side of the class struggle thought.

That, after a year of B-school, I went to work in management, in whose ranks I've remained (even becoming -- gasp -- an owner), doesn't mean I underwent any kind of conversion: Upper Broadway is not the Damascus road. But, as education is wont to do, the experience opened my eyes to things I had been blind to.

I recall one class -- Conceptual Foundations of Business, I believe it was called -- in which we discussed the dilemma of liberal capitalism: how to balance efficiency -- the raw, naked power exerted by market forces -- with equality --...