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PARADOXES OF EGALITARIANISM: PRACTICE, MORAL ANALYSIS, AND POLICY PRESCRIPTIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2023

Jeffrey Paul*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Policy Center, John Chambers College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract

This essay seeks to answer the question of how the behavior of wealthy advocates of some version of socialism can be reconciled with their advocacy of those ideas. The answer is that the conception of egalitarianism under which they choose to live is one that redistributes income, not wealth, while the egalitarianism that they advocate for others is that in which all wealth is the property of one person who decides how much will be distributed to others.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2023 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA

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Footnotes

*

Social Philosophy and Policy Center, John Chambers College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University, jpaul@sppfbg.org. Competing Interests: The author declares none.

References

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2 Cohen, G. A., If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 154 Google Scholar.

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10 For the details, see Peter Schweizer, Do As I Say (Not As I Do) (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 164; see esp. 157–66 for a short account of Soros’s business behaviors.

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40 In 2005, Michael Graetz, then a law professor at Yale Law School, and Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale University, published a book intended to repel efforts to rescind the estate tax. They devoted 252 of the 282 pages in Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) to defending the importance of retaining a levy tax that never raises more than .5 percent of federal expenditures and never impedes the transfer of wealth from the super-rich to their heirs. The mystery of this hysterical defense of what is both an insignificant source of federal revenues and a completely ineffectual instrument of “redistribution” is resolved in the book’s final 30 pages. There it surfaces that the authors’ real concern is that a successful effort to repeal or reduce this insignificant source of government revenue might encourage the principal funders of federal operations—income earners—to petition for lower income and payroll taxes. “And if progressive taxes and progressive tax rates are purged from the system,” the authors write, “the amount of taxes the government can raise becomes limited” (277). How dare these peasants? Imagine the impudence of the income earner who wants to retain most of what rightfully belongs to him and limit the functions of government to those appropriate for a natural rights republic.