The Socialist Nonsense of Distributive Justice

The socialists claim they simply want a fair division of the wealth, an equal sharing of the cake for all. They call it “Distributive Justice”

All sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it?
After all who would be in favour of an unfair division of the wealth, or “Distributive Injustice”?

This is however, just another example of the left twisting words with positive emotional content to mean entirely different things to further their agenda, just like:

Child Poverty
Fuel Poverty
Freedom 

The problem of course is that there is no THE wealth or THE cake.
(There is MY wealth, YOUR wealth, HIS cake and HER cake.)

True distributive justice requires a knowledge of how the wealth was created.

Let’s simplify the explanation by considering a desert island scenario.

Five people are shipwrecked on a desert island. They wander around the island together and discover, by luck, a small natural orchard of fruit trees.

I would find it hard to argue that anything other than an equal division of this wealth, found by luck, is fair. In this case I agree with the socialists that distributive justice requires equal shares.

As time passes four of the people are quite happy to sit in the shade of the orchard, spend their days talking, relaxing and living off the fruit, hoping that a ship might rescue them.

One person, we shall call him Murray, wants more from life. He spends his time searching the island for suitable plants to make yarn. After many hours, over several months, of trial and error he discovers a plant and a process that can produce yarn. He sets about trying to make the yarn into netting. It is more difficult than he imagined but  eventually after many long days and nights he manages to construct a net. Then he goes fishing. At first he catches nothing, it takes quite a lot of skill and effort to master fishing with his improvised net, but he perseveres. After weeks of catching nothing he finally catches a large Tuna fish.

Now the socialists call upon their version of distributive justice and say that THE wealth (the  Tuna fish) must be shared equally among the five people on the island. They ignore the fact the wealth was created entirely by Murray and is therefore not THE wealth, it is MURRAY’S wealth.

True distributive justice demands that Murray should be able to keep his fish and eat it all himself, or share it if he wants to, but the decision should be entirely his.

Now most people with any common sense would agree with the second version and that Murray’s wealth should not be shared equally, unless that is what Murray wants.
(They would almost certainly fail to see that this is exactly what taxation does, but…)

Socialist philosophers have a “clever” way around this. They say that there is actually no difference between the wealth found by luck which rightly belongs to all and the wealth created by Murray.

Their reason is, that all people are a product of luck and the people who sat around and did nothing do so because they are pre-disposed to do this by the luck of nature which gave them their genes. Likewise Murray was pre-disposed to work and be productive through no merit of his own. It was the luck of nature which gave him the genes to be productive and the inclination to use them.

Therefore all wealth is ultimately the result of luck and no one is entitled to any more of it than anyone else.

Amazingly, many “intellectuals” find this argument convincing. (or at least a suitably coherent cloak to mask their envy of those more wealthy than themselves)

The implications of this view are not limited to distributive justice and it is in the absurdity of their ramifications in other areas that the nonsense is exposed:

If people can take no credit for their positive activities in the creation of wealth, because they are not responsible in any meaningful way, they were simply lucky in the lottery of nature and received genes that left them no choice, then it MUST follow that you cannot blame anyone for their negative activities either.

The sadistic  paedophile who tortures and murders an innocent child cannot be punished, he is not responsible in any meaningful way, he was simply unlucky in the lottery of nature and received genes that left him with no choice.

The socialists cannot have it both ways!

People are either responsible for their actions, in which case the wealth they create belongs to them, or they are not responsible for their actions in which case we must let all the evils of the world go unpunished.

It seems, to me at least, that a society that cannot punish crime is far too high a price to pay to ease the envy felt by socialists.