Prof. David Lay Williams
DePaul University
Prof. Williams:
I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful January 13th essay “Concern about inequality is *not* mere envy.” But I find it unconvincing.
It’s certainly true that envy isn’t the only, or even the chief, motivating emotion that fuels intellectual and popular hostility to large differences in incomes. Yet contrary to your argument – and as you will see if you read past the titles – none of the individuals with whom you take issue, including me, is guilty of claiming that it is. Professors Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, I, and others who decry today’s obsession with income differences blame much of this obsession on intellectual errors, including (but not limited to) treating modern economies as being zero-sum, ignoring the effects of taxes and transfers, and failing to account for the non-monetary values of different voluntary choices that people make – choices that inevitably lead to different monetary incomes.
Further, your argument rests largely on an appeal to the authority of past prominent thinkers such as Plato, St. Augustine, and Karl Marx.
Most of the past thinkers who you mention lived before the modern market era. Pre-industrial economies were far closer to zero-sum institutions than is today’s global market economy. Back then, large differences in income were much more likely to result from oppression and special privileges than is the case today. Jesus, St. Augustine, and even Plato spoke and wrote about economies that differed in fundamental ways from the kind of economy about which Profs. McCloskey, Pinker, and Sowell write.
And although Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, and Marx did write during the modern era, even if we ignore the not-insignificant fact that each of these scholars wrote before the marginal revolution, your argument gets little traction from their works. Marx was simply an awful economist who was blind to the positive contributions made by entrepreneurial and capitalist initiative. Mill, despite being an impressively competent economist, wrongly supposed that the amount of income generated in an economy is – or can be made to be – largely independent of how that income is ‘distributed.’
As for Smith, he objected chiefly to high incomes gotten, not through honest market activity, but through protectionism and other government-granted privileges. Even as he worried that large differences in even market-earned incomes might sometimes lead poor people to excessively admire rich people, Smith was clear that these differences also can spur productive economic activity. Importantly, you’ll find nothing in Smith’s work to support income ‘redistribution’ of the sort that’s demanded by the individuals who you admiringly list: Bernie Sanders, Zack Polanski, and Pope Leo XIV.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
P.S. After graduating from law school in 1992, I received a lucrative job offer from a DC law firm. I also received an offer, for a much-lower-paying tenure-track academic position, from Clemson University. I eagerly accepted the latter offer despite knowing that my lifetime monetary earnings would have been much higher had I instead accepted the former offer. Did I do myself an injustice? Did society do me an injustice? Did Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos do me an injustice? And whose incomes should today be lowered by government taxation in order that my income might be raised?
