Gee’s Reviews > The Ethics of Redistribution > Status Update

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