Just in time for the Fourth of July, Harvard Magazine is out with its July-August issue, with a cover featuring the American flag being eaten away by worms. The alarming headline: “Unequal America: The Growing Gap.”

It’s hard to know where to begin. Our favorite example was the magazine’s misquote of two Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, who is a regular contributor to The New York Sun. Harvard Magazine writes, “the U.S. Constitution ‘is still the same document approved by a minority of wealthy white men in 1776.'” Yet the Constitutional convention was in 1787, not 1776, and there have been 27 amendments, as the economists noted in the work Harvard Magazine misquotes. Maybe Harvard should stop worrying about solving income inequality and start teaching its graduates, including the cover story’s author, the basic facts of American history.

Then there is the section of the article in which a concept “social scientists call relative deprivation” is introduced. Explains Harvard Magazine, “The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more.” As an authority for this, the article quotes — wait for it — Karl Marx, and without a hint of irony.

It would be tempting to chalk this all up to the ivory tower leftism of Cambridge, Mass., or, to take a Marxist approach, to Harvard’s interest in prying more money for itself out of donors and taxpayers. The article concludes with a plea for Americans to make “a decision to fund higher education the way they chose to fund universal public high-school education early in the last century,” and to “break down barriers to higher education” as a way of reducing inequality.

But that would be understating it. For concern about income inequality has spread far beyond the pages of Harvard Magazine into the presidential campaign and even the writings of center-right columnists such as David Brooks of the New York Times.

Given the dangers, it is reassuring to find some shreds of hope in the Harvard Magazine dispatch. It quotes a survey in which 71% of Americans agreed with the opinion that “the poor could escape poverty if they worked hard enough,” while only 40% of Europeans agreed with the same statement. The magazine seems to view this as a sign of American bias, that Americans are more inclined than their counterparts in Europe to “view poverty as a personal failing.” But we can’t help but see it as an encouraging sign that Americans, even those in the lower half of the income distribution, see our land as a place of opportunity.

That may be the real reason — not the supposedly inflexible Constitution — that America’s government engages in less income redistribution than do many European countries. It’s good sense, not the Constitution, that prevents Americans from seeking higher taxes and bigger welfare checks. Most Americans oppose increasing wealth redistribution measures because they value their freedom, and they believe that freedom is, ultimately, the best guarantor of their prosperity. The Harvard Magazine article quotes another Harvard professor, Christopher Jencks, who is the Weiner professor of social policy at the Kennedy School of Government, as blaming the Constitution’s framers, who, the article says, “enshrined property rights as sacred.”

In fact the property right, so important in the American Revolution, was left out of the Declaration of Independence, which substituted “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” for the life, liberty and property that were invoked by John Locke and in earlier colonial documents. The Constitution itself, aside from an Article Four reference, since deleted, to returning fugitive slaves, omitted property rights entirely in its original text. They were added in the Fifth Amendment, which states, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Meantime, if Harvard is so concerned about inequality, it could take its own $35 billion endowment and give it away to the thousands of other colleges that are poorer. Or it could lobby for government legislation to tax away its endowment and give it away to other colleges so that they all ended up with the same endowments, even if those other colleges were not as well managed and had students and professors who worked less hard. But Harvard will do no such thing.

Which is a good thing, and a reminder for those who appreciate Harvard and other institutions like it that a little inequality now and then has its virtues. So long as there is equality of opportunity, inequality of outcome needn’t always be looked at as a worm eating into the fabric of America. It is more like one of the threads of freedom.