… is from page 638 of the newly published final volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s paradigm-shifting trilogy on the essence and role of bourgeois values in modern life (footnote deleted; link added):
The indulging of the vice of envy shows in many arguments on the left. [Tony] Judt, justifies taxing the rich explicitly as “diminishing social tensions born of envy.” Perhaps it would be better – as Henry Clark and I would suggest – to earnestly counsel people not to indulge the vice of envy.
It would be amusing, were the reality not so sad, to reflect on the positive correlation between the expressed fear that “Progressives” claim to have of envy-born-of-inequality boiling into destructive social unrest and those same “Progressives'” seemingly boundless enthusiasm for insisting incessantly and loudly to all who will listen that monetary-income (or monetery-wealth) inequality is today at dangerously high levels. And these loud bewailers of such inequality remain silent about the growing equality of what really matters: consumption opportunities.
