To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. So said George Orwell in 1946, and it's still true. What Orwell had in mind was the human tendency to ignore evidence that contradicts some deeply held conviction, even when that evidence is right before your eyes. We can ignore the obvious in another way too – when we become so used to it that we no longer even see it.

Perhaps both processes explain why there is little outrage at unfairness so glaring that the evidence of it piles up by the day. Take this week alone. The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, announced that he was calling in the Serious Fraud Office to investigate the private security company G4S for "overcharging" tens of millions of pounds on the electronic tagging of offenders.

"Overcharging" comes wrapped in quotation marks because it's a rather polite way to describe billing the taxpayer to tag criminals who had either gone abroad, returned to jail or died. Grayling also named a second company, Serco, that had been paid for nonexistent services since at least 2005 if not 1999. G4S have refused to submit to a voluntary forensic audit, but not to worry: the company has promised to "reimburse any overbilling" it identifies.

The technical term for this is chutzpah. If you or I were caught stealing, we would not get off the hook by offering to hand back what we had taken. That option was certainly not available to the man jailed for six months for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 during the summer riots of 2011. But he's not one of the corporations who, despite a proven track record of incompetence – recall G4S's failure to provide security guards for the Olympics, leaving a gap only filled by sending in the troops – nevertheless suck billions from the public teat. At last count in 2010, companies involved in so-called public sector outsourcing – taking on tasks once done by government employees – were raking in no less than £80bn, a figure that is rising ever higher even without "overbilling".

But G4S's offer of reimbursement rings a familiar bell, resonant of Starbucks' response to the discovery that it had paid next to no tax. You'll remember that the milky-drinks giant offered to write a £10m cheque to Revenue & Customs, the first half of which it handed over last month. Again, this is a privilege – deciding for yourself exactly how much tax you should pay, then expecting applause as if you had performed an act of philanthropy – that is not available to the rest of us.

All our politicians talk endlessly about "fairness", ever since equality became too dangerous a word to utter in public. But the evidence is that different rules apply to different people, with the very rich all but exempt. Witness the remarkable balance sheet of Twitter, tipped for an $11bn (£7.3bn) stock market flotation, yet which last week reported a meagre £92,408 in UK profits.

Examples come daily to illustrate how different rules apply to those who are, as Orwell put it, more equal than others. Public sector workers are expected to get by on a 1% pay rise which, thanks to inflation, amounts to a pay cut. Not all public sector workers, however. If they are members of parliament they should get a pay rise of 11%, according to the independent body that sets the rules. (I have no objection, incidentally, to paying our representatives properly: it's the gap between them and other public employees that's wrong.) If they happen to have sat around the BBC's top table, they left with hundreds of thousands of pounds of licence-payers' money, close to a million in the case of the lucky Mark Byford. What definition of fairness does that meet?

Credit should go to the parliamentary committees that shone a bright light on both the BBC payouts and the tax habits of Amazon, Google and Starbucks. On Thursday it was the turn of the Treasury select committee as it questioned George Osborne. The key interrogator was the Labour MP Teresa Pearce, who extracted from the chancellor the admission that he had never been to a food bank and did not know that what pushed people to use them most was a delay in receiving the benefits on which they depend – highly relevant given his plans to make the newly laid-off wait longer for help.

Equally telling, Pearce asked Osborne why the maximum amount of housing benefit that can be claimed for a one-bedroom flat in London is £250 a week, yet for a flat of the same size in the same city an MP can claim up to £350. Why the difference? Osborne had no good answer.

He preferred to talk about his plans for the next parliament, in which "tax increases will not be required". Instead, the deficit will be tamed by cutting what he calls "welfare": in other words, those who have the least will get less. It's a pattern that has become so wearily familiar, we barely notice it: the national belt has to be tightened, so we make sure it squeezes those who are already gasping for air.

As with money, so with power. Ministers dropped their plain-wrapping plan for tobacco on Friday because, as comedian David Schneider quipped on Twitter, they "clearly can't kick their 20 cigarette lobbyists a day habit". The Tories have received £25m from hedge funds, but that barely gets a mention, the political village preferring to obsess over the cash Labour receives from trade unions. And the cronyism at the top only gets worse, our masters unable to see beyond their own gilded circle: note the reviews announced this week by Henry Dimbleby (on school lunches) and Camilla Cavendish (healthcare assistants); one a holiday pal, the other a former colleague, of the education secretary, Michael Gove.

If all this were carrying on in period costume, we would be appalled by it – a Downton Abbey world of elites looking after themselves, the rich getting richer while the rest see even the crumbs that fall from the table rationed: a land of double standards where those with much expect more and believe that the rules, like taxes, are for the little people.

It's hard for us to see all this, because it clashes with our belief – more a hope, really – that society should get better, that we left such crude inequality in our past. Or, when we do see it, perhaps we are so resigned we simply shrug. But it's still there, right in front of one's nose.

Twitter: @Freedland