Status Updates From The Ethics of Redistribution

Not sure why anyone references this. I've seen at least a few libertarian-leaning books mention it.

It is just a series of poorly argued lectures, which, as the description notes, ignores most of the common arguments about redistribution.

I've yet to encounter any notion of ethics either, just the type of cultural referencing and sentence structure you find in a POMO tract.

The first comment tends to dispel the idea that human nature revolts against inequality of means. Quite the reverse, it accepts it so habitually that Pareto thought inequality was at all times and everywhere expressed by the same function, with much the same parameters

Culture and civilization, indeed the very existence of society, depend upon such voluntary, unrewarded activities. They are time-and resource-consuming and costly. There seems to be little awareness among us that they have entered upon a precipitous decline.

the allocation of resources resulting from such distribution of incomes as appears to them most desirable is, precisely as before, the best only from the angle of subjective wants, weighted by the new distribution of incomes.

Men will not, however, be uniform in character; some differences in tastes must exist among individuals. Economic demand will not any more be weighted by differences in individual incomes that will have been abolished: It will be weighted solely by numbers.

Outstanding economists have found no difficulty in extending the axiom of diminishing utility to income. Thus Professor Pigou: "It is evident that any transference of income from a relatively rich man to a relatively poor man of similar temperament, since it enables more intense wants to be satisfied at the expense of less intense wants, must increase the aggregate sum of satisfactions.,,

In order to achieve our floor, we cannot be content to remove the surplus of the rich; we must eat deeply into lower-middle-class incomes

Riches had been a scandal in the face of poverty; now poverty was a scandal in the face of riches

It may be regarded as compounded of two convictions: one, that it is good and necessary to remove want and that the surplus of some should be sacrificed to the urgent needs of others; and two, that inequality of means between the several members of a society is bad in itself and should be more or less radically removed.

The moral seduction of socialism lies in the fact that it repudiates the methodical exploitation of the personal interest motive, of the fleshly appetites, of egoism, which held pride of place in the economic society it has undertaken to supersede

Agrarianism can be summed up under the heading of fair rewards. Socialism aims even higher than the establishment of "mere" justice. It seeks to establish a new order of brotherly love. The basic socialist feeling is not that things are out of proportion and thus unjust, that reward is not proportional to effort, but an emotional, revolt

Thus, agrarian egalitarianism may be said to embody two notions: one that natural resources are not to be engrossed, the other that fair rewards can be obtained only when the supply of capital is evenly spread out

Agrarian reformers are often claimed by the socialists as their forerunners. They are not; but the two groups do have one preoccupation in common: Both want to eliminate the effect of an unequal distribution of property.

Hayek's conjecture in The Constitution of Liberty that the redistributionist state is bound to be an expansionist state, like de Jouvenel's earlier warning, has been increasingly borne out by events.

The consequence of redistributionist policy, accordingly, is the curtailment of private initiative in many spheres of social life, the destruction of the man of independent means, and the weakening of civil society.