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… is from page 110 of Anthony de Jasay’s 2002 book, Justice and Its Surroundings [2]:
Since the sociopsychological assumption that workers work and managers manage better if enough redistribution is going on does not follow from anything in human nature that we know of, if other empirical evidence does not uphold it, nothing does. However, for those who have lived the industrial relations in pre-Thatcher Britain after decades of intensifying redistribution; absenteeism and disability fraud in Holland in the 1970s and 1980s; the breakdown of the “Swedish model” in the late 1980s; the devouring of public finances by the welfare state, the consequent menace of going under in a public debt trap in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Spain, Canada, and to a lesser extent the United States; for those who are witnessing these sad symptoms, the idea of buying efficiency with redistribution sounds like black humor.