What’s even more disturbing than the original post by the resident blogger are the comment replies contained herein (especially the first one in this case).

“Our ability to become wealthy in a market libreal [sic] order depends crucially on the maintenance of certain set of beliefs, expectations, behavioral norms and various state and non-state institutions. Our interests are complexly interrelated and mutually supporting. This is why it is total nonsense to characterize the market as a morality-free zone of self-interested atomized individuals jockeying to step on each others’ heads on their way up.”

I’m afraid this does not quite work. We can use a simple example from Richard Dawkins’ _The Selfish Gene_. Assume all the birds of a particular species on an island are unselfish cooperators when it comes to grooming one another. In other words, there are prevailing norms and expectations. How on earth can atomistic selfishness arise in a system that is richly interrelated and mutually supporting? Well, use your imagination (or read the book). Just because the ability to generate wealth crucially depends on mutual support does not mean that system will reward cooperators. Omigosh, isn’t there a common term economists use to describe this behavior? Free-*something*

Maybe the original author would contend that situation is absurd! Hmph- Unselfish cooperators. But that would take quite a bit of gumption from someone who posits telekinetic dwarves.

“It is especially incoherent when welfare liberals accuse markets of involving BOTH radical cooperative interdependence, such that much of a society’s wealth is a “social product” to which individuals have no moral claim independent of some rule of distibutive justice, AND a kind of radically fragmented free-for-all state of nature war of all against all. Mashaw doesn’t make this mistake, but it’s just stunning how often you see it.”

“Cooperative interdependence” is the misleading phrase in this context. Who are the welfare liberals making this accusation? I know, I know, they’re out there, somewehere. The essentials of the “welfare liberal” argument can be found on the website for the _Boston Review_ in the “New Democracy Forum”. See the section on a universal basic income and look up Herbert Simon’s piece.

Once one understands the basic argument it’s easy to see how this “cooperative interdependence” fosters selfish, anti-social, look-out-for-number-one, attitudes. Even the Randroids manage to grasp this elementary concept.

If I might be so bold as to conclude with an example from Thomas Sowell’s awful book _Basic Economics_. I’m sure Sowell has written nearly a dozen awful books, but this is the only one I bothered to read.

Therein Sowell uses the (unoriginal, but powerful) example of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to show the ideal of remuneration in accordance with marginal productivity of labor doesn’t hold in the real-world. We often tend to regard hitting as very individualistic (hey no one else is in the batter’s box). But there is somone in the on-deck circle, and in the case of this Yankees ball club that would have been one Mickey Mantle. Pitchers were naturally reluctant to walk Maris because it would put a runner on base and then they’d have to face off against Mantle (arguably an even better hitter, and certainly more feared). So Maris got a boost from his teammate (he didn’t really hit 61 homers all by himself). And today players get a boost from the ever-growing body of medical and nutritional literature that becomes more widely available — and of course the person who supplies them with illegal muscle enhancers.

I wonder if there isn’t another way to look at this question. A state of society is a historical moment in time and not just a complex interplay of people and activity frozen at (and abstracted from) the moment. The great innovators who make huge fortunes present one sort of ethical issue if the question is restricted to the moment. But viewed historically, innovations transform the reference frame in which ethical choices are defined.

Since the 1920s, both conservatives and liberals have conflated the flow with the moment, with trickle-down theorists taking the flow to be everything and redistributionists taking the moment. I would think that the question of what is owed to people first requires separating the question of what relative shares of income people receive from the question of what absolute needs people have. The question then would be how far a society can go to guarantee absolute needs and remain productive, if both are desired and if they are in any sort of tension.

Well, Monkyboy probably *doesn’t* need anything more. The rest of us … well, we’re better than Monkyboy. We have some curiosity about the world around us, we ask questions, we don’t sit content with pat bullshit answers from talking heads who couldn’t reason their way out of a cardboard box. We have an interest in continuing to learn the things that others have discovered and developed. Since many of us have such an interest, they built special places where we can go and learn about history, ethics, cognitive science, economics, and so forth.

Not for you, Monkyboy? That’s fine, we don’t mind. Just don’t mock things you don’t understand. Get back to your NASCAR race and your malt liquor, and mouth back the same old bullshit that we all hear on the television. University departments weren’t meant for people like you, anyway.

The second argument is derived by David Gordon of the Mises Institute from S L Hurley’s Justice, Luck, and Knowledge. The core of the argument is thatthere’s no reason to assume that in the absence of good/bad luck, we’d make more equal amounts of money. Either you assume we start out from equality, in which case you’re simply defining luck and inequality to be the same, and thus can’t treat luck as an independent cause of inequality; or you realize that luck is just a matter of how else things could have turned out, and we can’t figure out what we owe to luck and what to other traits. Hurley argues for redistribution under different grounds, but I have other problems with her argument.

A third response that occurrs to me is that some things can arguably be products both of luck and of desert. For instance, suppose that I was born with some inclination to be honest, work hard, and get ahead. On the one hand, I was born with these traits, and so don’t “deserve” the rewards I reap from them; on the other hand, these traits seem to me morally praiseworthy. If you say that chance cannot create desert, you’re arguably undermining the whole premise of desert itself.

1. Wealth (or income) variance depends (in part) on luck.

2. No one deserves their luck.

3. Therefore, wealth (or income) variance is (in part) undeserved.

4. Undeserved wealth (or income) variance is undesirable.

5. Therefore, public policy should try to reduce wealth (or income) variance (ceteis paribus, not at all costs).

That argument does not depend on the telekenetic dwarf principle that we ought to pay people an amount commensurate to the benefit we receive from them, even if they will do it for less.