“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.
Don’t they know that the expansion of pi is infinite 😦
But I think this looks at the wrong economy. From a political perspective taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people means more poor people vote for you. It might mean less rich people vote for you, but since there are a lot more poor people than rich people then that is a net benefit. Moreover, you have the additional benefit that it means that rich people start giving you money both legitimately for your campaign, and illegitimately in other ways (including paying you massive speaking fees or giving you a job or consulting gig after you leave.) They do this to try to gain some control over this instinct to tax the rich to give to the poor.
So, what we have is an equilibrium: take money from the rich to give to the poor to get more votes, but this is constrained by the politicians being bought off by the rich to keep it from going too far. And everyone agrees to the narrative that the rich screwed the poor to get rich, giving it a patina of morality, while the rich get to hobnob with the powerful, influence policies that get them more rich, and salve their conscience by setting up charitable foundations that pay for their private jets and expensive hotel rooms while they fly to conferences to talk about wealth inequity and climate change.
Nozick is talking about what would produce the fairest, wealthiest society, but that assumes a good faith effort to do so on the part of the corrupt political set. Which does not seem to me to be a reasonable assumption.
The more astute poor people do notice that this wealth redistribution always leads to the pie getting smaller and leaving them worse off than they otherwise would have been getting a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.