You must believe it is fair and just for you to keep the wealth that flows from the honest work of your own labor and your own mind.

It sounds so simple, and so true --and indeed it is! Yet the politicians and the media harangue you endlessly and in endless ways to make you forsake it, playing to your guilt, your sympathy and even your greed.

How astonishing it is, then, to hear this idea spoken on the pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Normally these pages are reserved for sermons about the plight of the impoverished, the greed of America's plutocrats, and the shame of conspicuous consumption. Considering that such sermons are sandwiched in between fashion features, full-page ads for luxury cars and jewelry, and classifieds for multimillion dollar estates and exclusive private academies -- and that the Times is owned by a company with a market value of $6.9 billion, of which at least 10% is owned by a single family -- I would say "it's about time."

In a commentary today, Rob Walker tells us "When Diamonds and Escalades Are O.K."  Follow the link and read the whole thing if you want (and wade through all the details about lifestyles and marketing strategies of rich and famous rappers), but I can summarize it in just a single sentence:

Singer/actress Jennifer Lopez deserves to be rich (and to flaunt it) because she earned it honestly through talent and hard work, but former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski doesn't because he earned it dishonestly, through fraud.

Isn't that just the basic morality we absorbed through our skins when we were kids? You deserve it if you worked for it, but you don't deserve it if you stole it. It doesn't take a genius.

What does it tell you about the New York Times that they would consider this blinding glimpse of the obvious to be worthy of a column? It tells you that, to them, it's not obvious at all -- this is news... man bites dog! But at the same time it makes me wonder how something like this slipped by the editors, normally so eager to play their part in the conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid. Maybe they didn't really understand what they were printing -- after all, on the surface, it has all the New York Times signature elements: a few good swipes at a greedy CEO, and a "sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon" (i.e., salacious details about sexy pop-stars).

The idea that you deserve to keep what you honestly worked for is as subversive as it is simple. It means that the distribution of wealth in our society is fair and just provided only that it was arrived at honestly. Even if every penny of wealth ends up in just one guy's pocket -- that may be dysfunctional, but if he earned it fair and square, then no can say that it is unjust.

This completely flies in the face of most public commentary about the distribution of wealth, which looks only at the fairness or justice of the outcome, without regard to how that outcome was achieved. Think about it -- what do you ever hear on this subject but protests about the unfairness and injustice of the "maldistribution of wealth" or "the gap between rich and poor" or "income inequality" from politicians and the media? How often do you hear statistics, cited as though no justification were remotely possible, such as "annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.'s went from $1.3 million -- 39 times the pay of an average worker -- to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers"? This quote comes from an 8000-word article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times Magazine itself, just last October.

The fact is that if you define fairness and justice in the distribution of wealth in terms of some desired outcome -- say, equality -- then you necessarily have to ignore the history of how the wealth was earned -- through creativity or crime? -- or how it got from the people who unequally earned it to the people who equally possess it -- through charity or expropriation? All that matters is that it ends up equally distributed at the end of day.

But think for a moment of what would be entailed in actually achieving the egalitarian outcome. Suppose someone like Paul Krugman could wave a magic wand and -- poof! -- all wealth were perfectly equally distributed. Within moments it would become unequal again. There'd be some Jenny from the block who'd turn out to be a great singer and dancer and actress, and people would happily choose to each give her a little bit of their wealth in exchange for watching her perform, and -- poof! -- after a year of that and she'd be "the rich." So how do we get back to a state of equality again -- simply seize Jenny's money and give it back to her fans? Force her to sing and dance and act for free in the first place?

Even if we manage to create a perfect socialist utopia, in which everyone pools their wealth according to their ability and draws from the pool according their need -- everyone has an equal share of everything -- what's to prevent someone from deciding to do without his entire ration of tofu that day and give some of it to Jenny so she would sing and dance and act in her spare time, after she was done with her day of tilling the soil on the commune? As the late philosopher Robert Nozick so ably put it in his masterpiece Anarchy, State and Utopia, to maintain equality "The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults."

To be sure, those who operate the conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid would be shocked -- shocked! -- to think that you misunderstood their noble efforts as necessitating such a deep invasion of your liberties. They've never talked about forcing you to do anything, or expropriating anything from you. No, all they've ever done is asked that you pay your fair share of taxes. What they don't want you to figure out, though, is that in their ideal world Jenny's "fair share" is precisely the amount required to return her wealth to the level that's equal with everyone else's (but without redistributing her wealth to anyone directly, of course -- it would be returned to them -- sort of -- in the form of valuable -- sort of -- government services funded by Jenny's riches).

Would people like Paul Krugman say that even that is not what they mean? Then what do they mean? If people like Krugman think that Jenny isn't entitled to keep her honestly earned wealth, and they don't intend to seize it in order to achieve the income equality they preach about, then what exactly are they saying? That there will be some sort of indefinite compromise in between, where Jenny will get to keep some of her excess wealth according to some decision process that someone -- perhaps Paul Krugman himself -- would be responsible for administering?

Wouldn't that be a wet-dream come true for Paul Krugman and the editors of the New York Times -- all the "little people" as Krugman describes himself -- to have Jennifer Lopez come to them as a supplicant, dependent for her wealth on their sophisticated exegesis? If you ever wonder what the people who operate the conspiracy to keep your poor and stupid are after, this is one of the answers. Don't pretend it's not.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:45 PM | link