A persistent problem with our debate over growing inequality is the tendency to assume that “equality” and “justice” must be somehow linked, such that growing inequality must be intrinsically “unjust.” But it takes only a few moments of consideration to realize that the two concepts have virtually nothing to do with each other.
First, we have to recognize that inequality in terms of outcomes is inevitable in any free society because people have, as James Madison put it, an “unequal faculty for acquiring property,” with “property” in that context referring to success and failure in life more broadly.
We might be equal before God (by virtue of our capacity for moral choice), equal before the law (in the sense of possessing the same basic rights and obligations), and equal in the sense of our lives having equal value, but we are not and never will be equal in terms of ability, character and ambition. Thus, natural inequality is, as the founders acknowledged, a consequence of freedom itself.
Whereas inequality is a permanent feature of free societies, “justice” refers more to the idea of fairness of treatment, including the receiving of“just rewards” on the basis of effort (merit).
To illustrate by example, in a classroom setting it would be just to seek to give every student essay the grade it objectively warrants. In such a scenario “justice” and “equality”are one in the same in that it is just to treat all students equally by grading them by the same standard and allocating grades as merit dictates.
But the equality inherent in that scenario stems from the idea of “equal treatment,” not equal results. Indeed, to seek to produce equal results by giving good essays lower grades and bad essays higher grades would be to do a grave injustice. If student scores on a given exam ranged from the upper 90s all the way down to the 50s, we wouldn’t assume that an injustice had occurred and that we should transfer points from the high scorers to low scorers to repair it.
In a similar sense, those accused of crimes against society’s laws are equal in the sense of being equally innocent until proven guilty and equally entitled to due process, but we do not subsequently send the innocent man to jail along with the guilty. That would be an equal outcome, but justice most certainly would not have been done.
In short, the mere existence of inequality is not unjust. If individuals vary in ability, character and ambition (just as students in a typical class do), and we define justice in relation to merit, a more powerful argument can be made that inequality is more just than equality of outcome.
Nor is an increase in inequality necessarily unjust if the increase came about because those who reaped greater rewards worked harder than those who fell further behind. To talk about growing inequality as injustice in an abstract fashion, based purely upon statistics, is to unjustifiably assume that neither the rich who got richer nor the poor who got poorer could possibly have deserved those outcomes. The concept of “social justice” is, by definition, useless unless we have a means of proving that the rich have reaped ill-gotten gains and/ or the poor have suffered from misfortunes beyond their control.
In the end, we construct fairly generous welfare states based on redistributionist logic not because of considerations of justice but because of compassion and “there, but for the grace of God go I.” Just as there is no inherent justice in taking points from one student and giving them to another in a classroom, there is nothing inherently “just” about taking money from those who have earned it and giving it to those who haven’t.
It is compassion that we are pursuing in such cases, not justice.
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China were not more just societies than contemporary America or Great Britain, but defining justice as greater equality of income would force one to claim otherwise.
Thus, it is entirely possible to imagine a scenario in which the rich work harder and more effectively while those lower down the ladder work less hard and often, with a resulting increase in inequality that would have little to do with any injustice inflicted by the former upon the latter.
Alas, there is ample evidence to suggest that it is something of that nature that has been happening in American society in recent decades-that a combination of a diminishing work ethic (reflected in swelling disability rolls) and family dissolution, both brought about by growing welfare-state dependency, is the primary driver of growing inequality, as well as reduced mobility and multigenerational poverty.
So what if the increasing inequality liberals bemoan is actually the consequence rather than the cause of reduced mobility and growing poverty?
And what if those unfortunate trends are caused not by the workings of an allegedly unjust capitalist system in which the rich make out like bandits but by that same welfare state that populist liberal politicians like President Barack Obama want to further expand?
In which case, how are they not recommending as treatment precisely that which caused the disease?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 02/03/2014