“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note than in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent hold less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p per cent (where p is greater than n) and so forth. They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered. On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at the distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends upon how the distribution came about.” (page 232)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick, First published in 1974.
I wonder if any of the leaders of today’s political parties in the UK have read it, still less understood the profound way that the late Harvard professor eviscerated egalitarian “patterned” ideas of justice more incisively than arguably anyone else, before or since. Somehow, I doubt they have. In this day and age of talk about wealth taxes and other horrors, Nozick is well worth reading again.
In the socialist mind there is a finite pie and it isn’t fair if some people get more pie than other people do. It never seems to occur to them that it is even possible to bake a bigger pie. If everyone has enough pie it doesn’t matter that some people have too much.
The other thing that doesn’t seem to register is that some people work more and spend less than other people do and end up better off. In their heads it is somehow fairer if these people are robbed and the proceeds shared out. The sharing out part never actually happens anyway.