Customer Reviews

Ethics of Redistribution, The

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Forty years ago Bertrand de Jouvenel gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University which have been published as The Ethics of Redistribution (Cambridge: University Press, 1952; reprint, Indianapolis: LibertyPress, c. 1990). Rather than assess economic or political questions, de Jouvenel asks an essentially moral question: ought wealth be redistributed by political dictate.
Since Aristotle, ethicists have recognized the legitimacy of distributive justice, granting certain goods to citizens with bona fide rights, such as life, liberty, and private property. Too frequently, in our century, clear definitions have been sacrificed, and "'just' is whatever is thought emotionally desirable" (p. 18). From earliest days those concerned for justice have focused on the right distribution of natural resources. Calls for agrarian reform, distributing a nation's land so as to enable all men to work and support themselves, have traditionally fallen under the umbrella of "distributive justice."
Income redistribution is something else, de Jouvenel argues. Redistributionism, far more than seeking to grant citizens what's due them, seeks to equalize wealth. Land was recognized as a gift of God, thus rightly shared by all. Income, the work of one's hands, comes not from God but from the person. So, in his first lecture, "The Socialist Ideal," de Jouvenel acknowledges "It is now generally regarded as within the proper province of the State, and indeed as one of its major functions, to shift wealth from its richer to its poorer members" (p. 5). The question is: ought such be done?
The past two centuries, socialistic thinkers have targeted "private property" as the principal culprit underlying class conflict and injustice. Abolishing private property, Marx et al. said, would lead to the withering away of the state and a utopian paradise. (Ironically, only religious communities seem able to live out the socialist vision. Saints like Francis of Assisi have cheerfully redistributed their wealth out of love for God and their brothers.)
Socialists, however, appalled by the anguish of the poor, blamed the rich and sought to rectify the glaring "injustice" through income redistribution. What they found, of course, is that the wealth of the "rich" was insufficient to eliminate the poverty of the poor. So ordinary workers had to be taxed as well as government planners seek to provide everyone "maximal satisfaction."
In the process of redistributing the wealth, the State becomes increasingly powerful. Indeed, de Jouvenel notes, in his second lecture, "The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State" (p. 72).
Still more: the voracious State even seeks to assume the financing artistic and cultural activities. "All advocates of extreme redistribution couple it with the most generous measures of state support for the whole superstructure of cultural activities" (p. 42). (To understand why the Congress first funded PBS, NPR, and NEH in the 1960's one must simply understand the ethics of redistributionism.)
In Lecture Two, de Jouvenel addresses "State Expenditure." Here he insists the redistributionists make a fatally-flawed assumption: that consumption defines "good life," to the degree that equalizing income equalizes happiness. In fact, our lives are enriched by many non-material goods. Talented, generous persons, if allowed to freely earn a living and accumulate goods, may in the process help a nation far more than their tax-taken wealth.
"Indeed," de Jouvenel says, "social history teaches us that what we have of civilization was bought at an enormous cost, the elites from which we derive our culture having been supported by sweated masses" (p. 59). Economically undeveloped countries, more than anything else, need generous-spirited leaders and entrepreneurs, not state-dictated redistributionism. Mandatory wealth-sharing schemes ultimately reduce the real wealth shared.
Still more: individuals and families should enjoy at least as many rights and privileges as corporate entities and states. Ironically, corporations and governments enjoy legal rights denied persons. For example, "the profit-seeking enterprise has a treble advantage over the family, which is taxed as progressive rates and is not allowed to provide for depreciation of its assets or to deduct operating expenses. And yet the family performs in society no less important a function than the firm" (p. 61). Imagine being able to deduct "entertainment" and "overhead" expenses on one's income tax forms! "It is quite incomprehensible that a breeder of dogs for the race-track should be allowed his costs, depreciation, etc., while the father of the family is not" (p. 62).
Individuals have been turned into tax-paying workers who support the State, which grants legal privileges to various corporations. They're allowed to keep part of their income and buy consumer goods. In the process, the purely voluntary cultural activities, the truly meaningful family en¬deavors, have been pushed to the periphery of society.