… is from page 73 of Liberty Fund’s 1990 edition of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s 1951 tract, The Ethics of Redistribution:
The role played by the state in transferring incomes evidently entailed some increase in the volume of public encashings and payments, but this volume has grown out of all proportion to the needs of this function. Such growth has encountered only the weakest opposition; my argument is that a change of mind toward public expenditure has been induced by redistributionist policies, the greatest gainer from which is not the lower-income class as against the higher but the State as against the citizen.
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