Distributive Justice

Dear Friends,

It seems to me that any governmental budget debate can be framed as a debate between whether or not the goods of society should be rightly distributed by either merit or political favor. The definition of merit being the main sticking point. Political favor being self explanatory.

Merit has been defined by Aristotle as a man of virtue, someone who is warlike and ready to defend his city, eschews comfort, is politically engaged and civic minded in his affairs. Distributive justice as Aristotle considered it required that this type of man get the goods of society distributed to him. This is one definition of merit but not the one I am using here.

Another definition of merit is a person or group strong enough to take what they want. As the Gaul King said to the Roman, “By natural law, the law that states the strong should naturally take from the weak.” This definition of merit is absolutely incompatible with the market system, (but compatible with social justice), and is another definition that we will not use.

The definition of merit we will use, is any person who can be considered the rightful producer of that good, whether directly as the person who whittles a tool handle or indirectly by compiling labor time in the form of money to procure the item. This is a form of merit that comports with our definitions of right and wrong and is our working definition of merit.

The distribution of the goods of society by political favor is also called social justice. This social justice is when a person in political power, an Elite, takes the property from one faction of society and redistributes it to another faction of society. This form of distribution of the goods of society, on the face, looks benign or even good.

Attention is always called to the inequalities in society by those people who seek to use social justice. But where the goods of society are distributed by political favor, universally, there is great poverty. Masses of people actually starve, sometimes intentionally to make a political point, sometimes due to the innate inefficiencies of that form of distributional justice. The aggregate lot of those societies that use political favor as the template for distributive justice inevitably goes down.

While those societies that use merit as the template, as much as politically possible, generally have the lot of their people go up. The impoverished in those societies have as their biggest concern, obesity. The gap is large but not nearly as large as in those the seek to redistribute to the poor. That only creates more poor.

It is by a variety of means that political distributive justice leads to aggregate poverty. One is the incentive system it sets up in society. The incentive under such a system is to garner political favor instead of producing a service or good. This lowers the GDP of any country as more and more people drop out of being producers to garnering political favor, making the pie grow smaller and smaller…

Another way political distributive justice or social justice insipiently introduces aggregate poverty in a country is the corruption it creates in government and civic affairs. There is no punishment for bribery, racism, personal vendettas or any other form of corruption in the civil service under social justice. The goods of society are distributed by political favor, if you are in government in the civil service, by definition, you have political favor…

There are many other pernicious ways social justice undermines the good ordering of society. It is especially good at creating people unfit to engage in the market system. Buy making people unable to control themselves sufficiently to engage in work, (How many times have you heard someone who can’t hold down a job say, “I won’t tolerate being treated like that…”), it makes people unable to concentrate long enough to be productive, among others, social justice creates an entitlement mindset that lowers aggregate GDP by rendering a large portion of the workforce, unfit for work, subtracting their production from aggregate GDP.

This all leads inexorably to communal poverty. Aggregate, or communal poverty, leads to more anger in the lower classes. This anger can be strung, tuned and played by the anti capitalist, in those countries that use social justice, to smash the market system and it’s evils like, class mobility and ever improving standard of living, for the stupid masses, who are nothing more than lab rats to be experimented with.

So, if we want aggregate poverty, social justice is the means we should employ, but if aggregate prosperity and an ever expanding standard of living is what we seek, it is meritorious distribution we want. The budget should react accordingly…