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... basic rights, like the right to be content). It is better to effect an egalitarian distribution of wealth through taxation and welfare payments. These are redistributive mechanisms which reset the "wealth clock" within every time frame (at the end of every month or fiscal year).
Still, is there any moral difference between confiscating and expropriating savings outright - and doing it through elaborate state apparatuses like the tax system? Not really. The anti-tax movements do seem to hold some moral grounds. That part of the tax revenues that is distributed to the less well off could easily be portrayed as punitive: it punishes enterprise, success, entrepreneurship, courage, foresight and many other virtues. Welfare, on the other hand, partly seems to reward dependence and parasitism.
We opened this article with Rates' Difference Principle. For him, all the principles of justice are reducible to principles of district retributive justice. This is far fetched. Many human activities are not income or money dependent.
There are inherent inequalities between people which do not allow us to respect them equally. Moreover: what drives humans (and, maximizes the benefits to the least advantaged) is based on conflict and inequality. It is the same as in the physical world. Equality might motivate people in the short term. But than it atrophies and leads to social corruption and death.
A useful lesson can be learned from the field of thermodynamics: an inequality of energy is required in order to generate motion and life. As energy dissipates and is equalized (a state of entropy) - all grinds to a halt and death prevails. A moral question does arise regarding natural inequalities. The mentally retarded, the mentally insane, the hemiplegia and quadriplegic, the chronically ill - did not choose to be so.
Dworkin (1981) proposed a compensation scheme. First, he postulated a model of fair distribution. In this model, all of us are given the same purchasing power and use it to bid, in a fair auction, for resources that best fit our life plan, goals and preferences. We are then permitted to use these resources as we see fit and although we may end up with disparate economic results, we cannot complain: we were given the same purchasing power and we could have bid for any other resource that we might have needed.
Dworkin assumes that prior to the hypothetical auction, people are unaware of their own natural endowments but wish (and are able) to insure against being naturally disadvantaged. Their payments will create an insurance pool to compensate the less fortunate for their misfortune. This scheme is, at best dubious. We are usually very much aware of our natural endowments and of the natural endowments and liabilities of others. Therefore, the demand for insurance is not unanimous and equal amongst us all. Some of us badly need and want it - others not at all.
If such insurance were available and were traded between willing buyers and sellers (who willingly forego resources to pay for it) - no moral problem would have arisen. But if such insurance is imposed upon those who do not need it or wish it and covers those who, ab initio, gave up no resources and did not invest work or effort in obtaining it - it is immoral. Such insurance is bought and paid for with a restriction of our freedoms and liberties. This, in effect, is the essence of most of the modern welfare programs.
This is not to mention the practical problem of how to measure differences in natural endowments, how to distinguish them from acquired ones and who will determine what should be included in the list of natural disadvantages. This is the philosophical basis of capitalism: that the market is wiser than any of its operators and participants. That humans do not need to bother themselves with constructing patterns of "just" distribution. That the market will reward justly those who deserve it (no matter which criterion for desert is used). Capitalism works, on the whole.
Its truth value is substantiated by its continued existence and success. The Libertarians adopted this view of human inability to dispense with justice by establishing a just pattern of distribution. Instead of imposing a pattern on society, they limited themselves to ascertaining that the market players engage in just acquisitions and in just exchanges. The market is just if the exchanges permitted in it are just and just actions always result in just outcomes. Justice is not dependent on a particular distribution pattern, whether as a a starting point, or as an outcome. Robert Nozick proposed his "Entitlement Theory" in 1974 which was based on this approach.
Still, one issue remained unresolved: the accumulation of wealth, ownership, why first owners should exclude others from owning the very same thing? What moral right to exclude others is gained from being the first? Nozick advanced the Lockean Proviso: an exclusive acquisition of the outside world is just only if, following it, there is "enough and as good left in common for others." If the position of others is not worsened by the acquisition - then it is morally permissible. But that their situation is not worsened - does not mean that it could not have been better in an alternative situation (distribution). There is no morally plausible and defensible justification of the Lockean Proviso. Exclusive ownership is the result of real-life irreversibility.
The first has the advantage of excess information, has invested work, time, effort. All these are irreversible facts leading to an irreversible situation: ownership. The act of owning involves investments and the latter relate to the future. Thus, we encounter another information asymmetry: we know nothing about the future and everything about the past. This asymmetry is known as "investment risk." By taking on investment risk - the first owner attains ownership.
Ownership is the compensation for investment risk, setting the asymmetry straight. The situation of the others is ALWAYS worse off by the amount of profits that the owner makes. Profits reflect inherent inefficiency, an intrinsic compensation. There is a law of conservation of benefits, the situation is always win-lose.
A product or service could always have been sold to the "others" for a profitless, lower, price, thereby increasing their well-being. If we say, on the other hand, that ownership is the result of adding value to the world, of improving reality - it is only reasonable to expect it to equal all the value added which can be derived presently and in the future. Equipped with this understanding of both our shortcomings (we are unable to construct a just distribution pattern which will also be practicable) and of our abilities (to barter investment risk for exclusive ownership) - we embarked on the long road to mature, full bodied, capitalism. We are still not there: visionaries keep popping up with new just distribution patterns, governments keep intervening, incomes keep being redistributed, ownership keeps being contested.
But these are phenomena of the past. As capitalism demonstrates its inexhaustible ability to increase well-being and the inexorability of this trend of increase becomes evident - the more inevitable the outcome.
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Research essay sample on Ownership Is The Result Lockean Proviso Distribution
