The Problem of Left Egalitarian Thought

THE PROBLEM OF LEFT EGALITARIAN THOUGHT

—“That is the problem with the egalitarian program in a state of post-industrial revolution production. A uniform level of income distribution is unnecessary in order for everyone to have an adequate level of consumption for necessary goods. I think the naive intuition of the leftist is that any hierarchy built based on relative performance in the market is illegitimate and must be based on exploitation. This is to deny the existence of human capital, in spite of the fact that many leftists spend years at university to develop their personal human capital.

(Ah, the internal contradictions of Marxism!)

This dissonance, of course, leads them to propose schemes that focus on redistributivity, like tax and transfer payments, that reduce the effectiveness of the competition for luxury consumption and the efficiency-producing decision-making hierarchies that result from them.

This creates malinvestment or, even worse, an insufficient level of capital production and deployment. This is a dangerous, immediate evil that rightists must combat. On this score, the white right is quite right.”—Duke Newcomb