> To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?

Because if total salary income were uniformly distributed across the population, the average would be like $80,000 a year.

casting aside a debate of whether its true every job is 80k/yr...lets say it is. What then? the market...the free market would supposedly adjust for all required goods

I'm failing to see the problem with that. Sure, $80k is less than $90k, but it's a hell of a lot better than what the vast majority of Americans currently enjoy.

I'm responding to the point of why people don't ask "why can't I have that too?" The answer is because it's literally impossible--everyone can't be above average. I myself don't think a flat income distribution would necessarily be bad. But I think most people think garbage men should make less than the average income, and doctors or programmers should make more than the average income. We can argue about how much more and how much less, but if you take any level of inequality as a premise, you can't reconcile garbage men making $90k.

And that overlooks that whatever measures would be needed to flatten the income distribution like that would also shrink the overall pie, as in Europe. The fact is that, even accounting for what the OECD calls "transfers in kind" (such as provision of government health insurance) American households have a lot more disposable income than European households: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (select the "gross, incl. social transfers in kind" drop down under "perspectives").

Americans aren't irrational. The majority is deliberately voting for an economy that produces more disposable income for the top 60%, at the expense of the safety net for the bottom 40%. This feature of the economy is reinforced over time due to immigration. Europeans migrate here to work as programmers, because they can make $500k/year in San Francisco versus $150k/year in Germany. My immigrant mom just came back from a long trip to Australia the other day, complaining how "small and close together the houses were." She said "America is really a land of opportunity. You can get rich here. You can't get rich in Australia." She doesn't care about communities suffering in generational poverty in Appalachia or Baltimore. And she is a party-line Democrat voter!