President Obama has been hopping up and down at his bully pulpit decrying the growing levels of inequality in our country. He says he wants to fix this cancer eating at the core of our society with a few tax incentives or some such over-the-counter-strength remedy. And even that has no chance of getting through Congress, which is constitutionally disposed against anything that can be called a remedy.

Many in the punditocracy say it’s hopeless. They sigh and imply that we will all just have to live with inequality (fortunately, they just happen to be on the fat end of the equation). But they are missing something so obvious that we start to wonder if they all have logs in their eyes.

It is particularly disappointing that President Obama, who probably does care about the issue, has missed this obvious solution. His enemies on the right would say he’s spending too much time hobnobbing with celebrities to do anything useful, but it’s precisely because he’s been hobnobbing with celebrities that he really ought to have seen this solution.

What is the problem with inequality? In essence it means that a few people have way more of the stuff everyone wants than most people can get. In the United States, the richest 0.1% now have so much of this stuff that they can build towers with it, dive and swim in it, and use it to perform personal ablutions, all while the poorest go cold and hungry for want of it.

Well, fixing that is hard. Because the rich have the money, they have the power, and you can’t just take it away without a fight. But what if we simply created a new kind of thing that everyone would want and gave it only to the people at the bottom of the income distribution? Then they have something that the rich want but can’t have. We can re-balance society without having to rework the economic system or fight against entrenched interests.

Here’s how it works.

Everybody loves celebrities. Everybody wants to see them sing, or dance, or act, or do other things that someone has clandestinely recorded and uploaded to the internet. Their fame sometimes seems like a lustrous, golden oil that they bathe in. Others want desperately to feel the touch of that oil.

Well, imagine if celebrities banded together to create a new class of entertainments that would be available exclusively to those in the bottom income brackets. A concert series, a new hot TV show, something else. The exact form doesn’t matter; it is a venue for allowing normal people once-in-a-lifetime access to our demigod stars. All the tickets are given away free and only to the poor.

Now we have a decision to make. Are these entertainments exclusively for the poor, meaning that tickets are non-transferable, or can they sell their tickets for a quick profit? If we allow them to sell their tickets, we know what will happen. The rich will pay out a comparatively small amount of their money and end up with all the tickets and nearly all the money. The point of our plan is to create an alternate source of value available only to the poor, and so we have to make tickets, or access in whatever form it takes, non-transferrable.

This is where the real genius of the plan kicks in. You see, the involvement of top celebrities will make our entertainments irresistibly desirable. Imagine if I told you that right now in a theatre downtown, your favorite stars were luxuriating and displaying themselves in ways they never have before? What if I said that some class of people is allowed to go in and see, but you are not?

The rich hate it when they can’t have something. That’s why they’ve done everything they’ve done—worked hard, slept with whatever unsavory types was necessary, sold out whomever they had to—to never be told, no you can’t have this. The ability to wave their hands and acquire things that others long for is precisely what makes them rich, and being rich is what makes them feel worthwhile.

So being locked out of these new shows will drive the rich a little berserk. They’ll spend their free moments—whether sitting in the backseat of a Mercedes or waiting for a companion at Le Cirque—dreaming about what they must be missing out on. They’ll turn over ideas and schemes about how to get it. They’ll talk amongst themselves about what they don’t and can’t have. The tables will be effectively turned, the rich longing for what the poor have, and the poor of course still longing for mansions, jets, etc.

This is a new form of equality, in which both sides crave what the other has.

Now this whole plan relies on celebrities using their power for good. You may wonder if they’ll really follow through. The celebrities who participate will, of course, lose out on a little time and potential income. However, this will be more than made up for by the salve such performance provides for their liberal consciences. Also, the knowledge that they are, by the power of their talent and fame, remaking American society for the better will appropriately bolster their egos. If President Obama really wants to fight inequality, he will explain this to some of his Hollywood pals and make them feel like the saviors of society that they could be and always have known they were in their hearts.

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