tly act as impediments to such resources for low-income individuals and households among visible minority population groups in the contemporary United States.
Alasdair Macintyre (1984) defined internal goods as those things that are beneficial to all individuals, while external goods are defined as those goods that are beneficial primarily to those individuals who possess them. Macintyre asserted that, to the extent possible, uncertainty and unpredictability must be eliminated from the political aspect of society through the introduction of consistency and coherency. Consistency is to be obtained through the recognition and adherence to an enduring set of values, or virtues. Coherency, thus, according to Macintyre is to be obtained through a "coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized" (Macintyre, 1984, p. 175).
The concept of social inequality is multidimensional in character (Labich, 1994). Income levels, vocation, residence, possessions, and other factors influence determinations of social class. Measures of inequality views these same factors from different perspectives, and extend such measurements to additional factors such as welfare. Wolfson (1994) reported that measures of socioeconomic equality either declined or remained unchanged from 1973 through 1981. Since 1981 the measures of inequality have been in general decline (Wheeler, 2005).
Plotnick, Smolensky, Evenhouse, and Reilly (1998) reported that social inequality increased in the United States from 1980 through 1998. The researchers then minimized the impact of this finding by stating that from 1945 to 1998, the level of social inequality in the country did not change at all. This latter finding is small comfort for proponents of social inequality, as it implies that at some point between 1945 and 1980 social inequality decreased. In fact, the low poin...