IN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY
Walzer, Michael
At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don't want to say...
...It is right that he should do that, however, only if he has been persuasive, stimulating, encouraging, and so on, and won the support of a majority of those same people...
...It would be immediately necessary to have a national health service, national legal assistance, the strictest possible control over campaign contributions...
...V The most immediate occasion of the conservative attack on equality is the reappearance of the quota system—newly designed, or so it is said, to move us closer to egalitarianism rather than to maintain old patterns of religious and racial discrimination...
...He's being paid as he goes, while the steelworker is piling up a kind of moral merit (so we have always been taught) by deferring pleasure...
...It is a neat argument but also a peculiar one, for there is no reason to think that "human talents and abilities" in fact distribute themselves along a single curve, although income necessarily does...
...They misunderstand one another, and make the mistake of each aiming at universal dominion...
...And even odder and more unsatisfying that they should be distributed (as they are) to people who have money, whether or not they made it, whether or not they possess any talent at all...
...But the correlation would be close enough, and it might also be morally plausible and satisfying...
...Him we have to pay, and he can ask, I suppose, whatever the market will bear...
...It isn't, on the face of it, a good reason for allowing him an enormous income...
...I am inclined to think that they are similarly built into a large number of social practices and institutions...
...Now, over any given period of time, it may be true that some men and women won't 2 Early Writings, trans...
...We owe different duties to different qualities: love is the proper response to charm, fear to strength, and belief to learning...
...The list is as endless as human desire and social invention...
...I have never heard anyone seriously argue that the woman must let herself be shared, or the hospital establish 5 "On Meritocracy and Equality," Public Interest, Fall 1972...
...The work he has done may also constitute a good reason for making him director of the local legal aid society...
...But if the right reason for receiving medical care is being sick, then the right reason for giving medical care is being able to help the sick...
...The case is even harder with respect to politics itself...
...The relation is complex, and I cannot say very much about it here...
...So long as money is convertible outside its sphere, it must be widely and more or less equally held so as to minimize its distorting effects upon legitimate distributive processes...
...The defense of inequality reduces to these two propositions: that talent is distributed unequally and that talent will out...
...Now, we all know the right reasons for the sorts of decisions, choices, judgments that are in question here...
...I shall try to respond to them in a serious way...
...Kristol insists that a snobbish dislike for the sheer productivity of bourgeois society is a feature of egalitarian argument...
...5 I confess that I am tempted by "equality of results" in the sphere of money, precisely because it is so hard to see how a man can merit the things that money can buy...
...Nor again need all these distributions follow this or that talent curve, for in the sharing of some social goods, talent does not seem a relevant consideration at all...
...I don't want to say, their unchallenged mastery, for in democratic states we have at least made a start toward restricting the tyranny of money...
...On the other hand, it is easy to list cases where merit (of one sort or another) is clearly the right distributive criteria, and where socialism would not require the introduction of any other principle...
...Indeed, the ability to hold or spend vast sums of money is itself a form of power, permitting what might be called preemptive strikes against the political system...
...There are two possible ways of setting things right...
...it may even be a good reason for making him a judge...
...T. B. Bottomore (London: Watts, 1963), p. 191...
...On the other hand, men are not free, not politically free at least, if his yes, because of his birth or place or fortune, counts seventeen times more heavily than my no...
...Six people speak at a meeting, advocating different policies, seeking to influence the decision of the assembled group...
...But it is in the very nature of money to be convertible (that's all it is), and I find it hard to imagine the sorts of laws and law enforcement that would be necessary to prevent monied men and women from buying medical care and legal aid over and above whatever social minimum is provided for everyone...
...q e The only writer he mentions is John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice Kristol seems entirely to misunderstand...
...It has little to do with the intrinsic value of the work or with the individual qualities of the worker...
...But so long as there are extrinsic reasons for wanting to be a doctor, there will be pressure to choose doctors (that is, to make medical school places available) for reasons that are similarly extrinsic...
...Nothing can win this, not even strength, for it is powerless in the kingdom of the wise...
...Nor, it should be added, can the pennant or the award be won by being strong, charming, or ideologically correct—at least we all hope not...
...The question is, how are the products to be distributed...
...No one else cares about it, he says, except the "new class" of collegeeducated, professional, most importantly, professorial men and women, who hate their bourgeois past (and present) and long for a world of their own making...
...VII have put forward a difficult argument in very brief form, in order to answer Kristol's even briefer argument—for he is chiefly concerned with the motives of those who advocate equality and not with the case they make or try to make...
...In the past they have indeed been distributed on a single principle: men and women have possessed them or their historical equivalents because they were strong or well-born or wealthy...
...Other people who deliver similar sorts of social goods should probably 401 be paid in the same way—teachers and lawyers, for example...
...The first bell is obviously the crucial one...
...We pay political leaders much less than corporation executives, precisely because we understand so well the excitement and appeal of political office...
...Six doctors are known to aspire to a hospital directorship...
...It would seem much better to pay the worker and the executive more or less the same weekly wage and let the sailboat be bought by the man who is willing to forgo other goods and services, that is, by the man who really wants it...
...One can stop overt bribery, limit the size of campaign contributions, require publicity, and so on...
...Here in the world of the petty-bourgeoisie, it seems appropriate that people able to provide goods or services that are novel, timely, or particularly excellent should reap the rewards they presumably had in mind when they went to work...
...Indeed, quotas in any form, new or old, establish "wrong reasons" as the basis of important social decisions, perhaps the most important social decisions: who shall be a doctor, who shall be a lawyer, and who shall be a bureaucrat...
...In these sorts of cases, of course, we all have standards to urge upon our fellows: we say that so and so should not be believed unless he offers evidence or that so and so should not be elected to political office unless he commits himself to civil rights...
...The money they pay is different from the praise they give, in that the first is extrinsically determined, the second freely offered...
...First of all, there are rewards, like the pleasure of exercising power, which are intrinsic to certain jobs...
...The MICHAEL WALZER properties of money," Marx wrote, "are my own (the possessor's) properties and faculties...
...It's not how a man feels, but how much money he has that determines how often he visits a doctor...
...From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is a fine slogan with regard to medical care...
...I would have thought that a deep appreciation of that productivity has more often marked the work of socialist writers...
...There is no criteria, I think, that will fit them all...
...But it isn't readily had, for there is no necessity implied by the doctrine of right reasons...
...A man accused of a crime is entitled to a fair trial simply by virtue of being an accused man...
...I have always been puzzled by that slogan, for socialists have never, to my knowledge, advocated a return to a barter economy...
...So long as the goods that medical schools distribute include more than certificates of competence, include, to be precise, certificates of earning power, quotas are not entirely implausible...
...The case is the same in the political system, whenever the state is a democracy...
...probably his reward has to be monetary...
...Johnson's remark: "There are few ways in which man can be more innocently employed than in getting money...
...The positions for which quotas are being urged are, in America today, key entry points to the good life...
...Here is another example of the doctrine of right reasons...
...But insofar as men are set free from the coerciveness of the state and from material necessity, they will distribute themselves in a more natural way, more or less as contemporary Americans have done...
...And that is why defense counsel can challenge particular jurors thought to be prejudiced: the fate of the accused must hang on his guilt or innocence, not on his political opinions, his social class, or his race...
...nor can they plausibly be grouped into a single class (citizens or comrades) as leftists still believe...
...But we have only made a start: think how different America would have to be before these three companies of men—the sick, the accused, 404 the politically ambitious—could be treated in strict accordance with their individual qualities...
...Quotas today are a means of lower-class aggrandizement, and they are likely to be resolutely opposed, opposed without guilt and worry, only by people who are entirely content with the class structure as it is and with the present distribution of goods and services...
...But there may be ways to avoid the triumph of the man who doesn't love— who buys love or forces it—or at least of his parallels in the larger social and politi cal world: the leaders, for example, who are obeyed because of their coercive might or their enormous wealth...
...2 It would not be any better if we gave men money in direct proportion to their intelligence, their strength, or their moral rectitude...
...But they may be able to do that only if the usual connections between place and reward are decisively broken...
...In all these cases, the personal qualities of the individuals involved (as these appear to the others) should carry the day...
...But clearly credence and power are not and ought not to be distributed according to my standards or yours...
...Many professionals don't share that understanding, but the opinion of ordinary men and women, in this case at least, is profoundly egalitarian...
...But it makes a great deal of sense if it is interpreted to mean the abolition of the power of money outside its sphere...
...MICHAEL WALZER 402 ing is that love and belief can't rightly be had in any other way—can't be purchased or coerced, for example...
...Tax money collected from all of us in proportion to our resources (these will never correlate exactly with our abilities, but that problem I shall leave aside for now) must pay the doctors who care for those of us who are sick...
...Kristol suggests that whenever intellectuals are not persuaded, they are secretly aspiring to a tyranny of their own: they too would like to rule outside their sphere...
...Even this curve would not correlate exactly with the income bell because of the intervention of luck, that eternal friend of the untalented, whose most important social expression is the inheritance of property...
...Insofar as we recognize the political character of corporations, then, we can pay their executives less too...
...Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc...
...It is a bad way, because one really wants doctors and (even) civil servants to have certain sorts of qualifications...
...But one might well want to be a corporation executive, day after day, merely to make all those decisions...
...Consider the range and variety of human capacities: intelligence, physical strength, agility and grace, artistic creativity, mechanical skill, leadership, endurance, memory, psychological insight, the capacity for hard work— even, moral strength, sensitivity, the ability to express compassion...
...where...
...And so medical schools should pay atten tion, first of all and almost exclusively, to the potential helpfulness of their applicants...
...Kristol doesn't argue that we can't possibly have greater equality or greater inequality than we presently have...
...Equality requires a diversity of principles, which mirrors the diversity both of mankind and of social goods...
...For those of us who are not content, anxiety can't be avoided...
...Even in corporations organized democratically, of course, the personal exercise of power will persist...
...It is better to ignore the motives of these "new men" and focus instead on what they say: that the inequalities we are all familiar with are inherent in our condition, are accepted by ordinary people (like themselves), and are criticized only by the perverse...
...In these sorts of cases, the right reasons for winning are built into the very structure of the competition...
...He has to have a chance, at least, to earn a little more money than his less enterprising neighbors...
...But none of these things will be enough to prevent the wealthy from exercising power in all sorts of ways to which their fellow citizens have never consented...
...Political power, celebrity, admiration, leisure, works of art, baseball teams, legal advice, sexual pleasure, travel, education, medical care, rare books, sailboats— all these (and much more) are up for sale...
...Kristol's bell-shaped curve is tyrannical only in a purely formal sense...
...There is little we can do, in the best of societies, for the man who isn't loved...
...I am strong, therefore men should love me...
...Kristol is especially adept at that rhetoric and strangely unconcerned about the reductionism it involves...
...If there is a popular defense of inequality, it is this one, but I don't think it can carry us very far toward the inequalities that Kristol wants to defend...
...In capitalist society, the actual exchange value of the work they do is largely a function of market conditions over which they exercise no control...
...3 The nature of tyranny is to desire power over the whole world and outside its own sphere...
...Another demonstrable fact...
...What is necessary is that everyone else be able to say yes or no...
...It is a feature of the argument I have made, however, that the right reason for distributing love, belief, and, most important for my immediate purposes, political power is the freely given consent of lovers, believers, and citizens...
...There is no reason for socialists to respect it, unless it turns out to be socially useful to do so...
...Each citizen is entitled to one vote simply because he is a citizen...
...From ancient times, doctors were required to take an oath to help the sick, not the powerful or the wealthy: That requirement reflects a common understanding about the very nature of medical care...
...Six writers publish novels and anxiously await the reviews of the critics...
...It can't buy the National Book Award: writers can be subsidized, but the judges presumably can't be bribed...
...Six men seek, the company and love of the same woman...
...Within his proper sphere, he is as good a citizen as any other...
...The market doesn't guarantee that he will in fact earn more, but it does make 406 it possible, and until some other way can be found to do that, market relations are probably defensible under the doctrine of right reasons...
...People who are able to make money ought to make money, in the same way that people who are able to write books ought to write books...
...Perhaps there are reasons for paying them more—but not meritocratic reasons, for we give all the attention that is due to their merit when we make them our leaders...
...And it is another "demonstrable fact that in all modern bourgeois societies, the distribution of income is also along a bell-shaped curve...
...But Marx's slogan doesn't help at all with regard to the distribution of political power, honor and fame, leisure time, rare books, and sailboats...
...But this only suggests that a society in which any single distributive principle is dominant cannot be an egalitarian society...
...Both communist and aristocratic societies are possible, he writes, under conditions of political repression or economic underdevelopment and stagnation...
...Democracy tends to reduce these, or should tend that way when it is working well, without significantly reducing the attractions of decision-making...
...In fact, wise men (at any rate, smart men) have often in the past defended the tyranny of the strong, as they still defend the tyranny of the rich...
...The doctrine of right reasons suggests that we pay equal attention to the "different qualities," and to the "individuality" of every man and woman, that we find ways of sharing our resources that match the variety of their needs, interests, and capacities...
...if you wish to influence other people, you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others...
...there is nothing unattractive, boring, debased, or philistine about a society organized to provide them for its members...
...II W hat egalitarianism requires is that many bells should ring...
...We want different defendants to be treated differently, but only for the right reasons...
...Which, if any, ought to be...
...IN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY require any medical treatment, a very large number will need some moderate degree of attention, and a few will have to have intensive care...
...This is an idea beautifully expressed in a passage from Pascal's Pensees, which I am going to quote at some length, since it is the source of my own argument...
...MICHAEL WALZER 408...
...Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another...
...Here the case is exactly as socialists have always claimed it to be: liberty and equality are the two chief virtues of social institutions, and they stand best when they stand together...
...Clearly, We all want men and women to develop and express their talents, but whenever they are able to do that, Kristol suggests, the bellshaped curve will appear or reappear, first in the economy, then in the political system...
...today, people can even buy police protection beyond what the state provides, though one would think that it is the primary purpose of the state to guarantee equal security to all its citizens, and it is by no means the rich, despite the temptations they offer, who stand in greatest need of protection...
...Now isn't it odd, and morally implausible and unsatisfying, that all these things should be distributed to people with a talent for making money...
...Whenever equality in this sense does not prevail, we have a kind of tyranny, for it is tyrannical of the well-born or the strong or the rich to gather to themselves social goods that have nothing to do with their personal qualities...
...This new standard is egalitarian, even though it obviously does not require an equal distribution of love and belief...
...Kristol does not discuss quotas, perhaps because they are not widely supported by professional people (or by professors) : the disputes of the last several years do not fit the brazen simplicity of his argument...
...But it's not necessarily true...
...But what sorts of personal qualities are relevant to owning a $20,000 sailboat...
...And which they were right to have in mind: no one would want to feed blintzes to strangers, day after day, merely to win their gratitude...
...The freely given support of one's fellow citizens is the appropriate criteria for exercising political power and, once again, it is not enough, or it shouldn't be, to be physically powerful, or well-born, or even ideologically correct...
...Now, the right way to possess useful and pleasing things is by making them, or growing them, or somehow providing them for others...
...I don't want to say that race and class are entirely unimportant: it would be wrong to underestimate the distortions introduced by an inegalitarian society into these sorts of human relations...
...In America today, it would take a steelworker about two years to earn that money (assuming that he didn't buy anything else during all that time) and it would take a corporation executive a month or two...
...Indeed, it is a modest proposal and already has wide support, even among those ordinary men and women who are said to be indifferent to equality...
...The marvels of social science!—this distribution is a demonstrable fact...
...It is obvious that being black or a woman or having a Spanish surname (any more than being white, male, and Protestant) is no qualification for entering a university or a medical school or joining the civil service...
...I don't see that being black is a worse reason for owning a sailboat than being a doctor...
...In an egalitarian society, however, quotas would be unnecessary and inexcusable...
...The resulting distributions would each, no doubt, reflect what Kristol calls "the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve," though it is worth noticing again that the populations in the lower, middle, and upper regions of each graph would be radically different...
...He has no air-conditioning, no secretary, no power...
...They open the way, that is, to a life marked above all by a profusion of goods, material and moral: possessions, conveniences, prestige, and deference...
...At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life...
...But this is not to say that men deserve whatever money they can get for the goods and services they provide...
...The only right way to collect votes is to campaign for them, that is, to be persuasive, stimulating, encouraging, and so on...
...Rich people, of course, always look talented— just as princesses always look beautiful— to the deferential observer...
...Any particular distribution may indeed be bellshaped, but there are a large number of possible distributions...
...Charming men and women don't deserve to be loved: I may love this one or that one, but it can't be the case that I ought to do so...
...pulse was to respond in kind, exposing antiegalitarianism as the ideology of those other intellectuals—"they are mostly professors, of course"—whose spiritual course was sketched some years -ago by the editor of Commentary...
...So nature is reestablished as a critical standard, and we are invited to wonder at the strangeness of the existing order...
...193-94...
...Equality is not a simple notion, and it cannot be satisfied by a single distributive scheme—not even, I hasten to add, by a scheme which emphasizes need...
...But almost everyone else talks about them, and Bell worries at some length, and rightly, about the challenge quotas represent to the "just meritocIN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY racy" he favors...
...Which of these curves is actually echoed by the income bell...
...perhaps he had this pensee in mind...
...It can't buy the American League pennant: star players can be hired, but victories presumably are not up for sale...
...Without liberty, then, there could be no rightful distribution at all...
...If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.4 The doctrine suggested by these passages is not an easy one, and I can expound it only in a tentative way...
...Sometimes, of course, they do this because they are persuaded of the necessity or the utility of tyrannical rule...
...Conservatives don't want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be, for that would invite a search for some distributive principle—as if it were possible to make a distribution...
...Quotas, as they are currently being used, are a way of redistributing these rewards by redistributing the social places to which they conventionally pertain...
...we collect it for its exchange value...
...Surely there is no meritocratic defense for this sort of difference...
...What Pascal and Marx are say 4 Early Writings, pp...
...In a capitalist world, money is the universal medium of exchange...
...In the U.S...
...Men don't naturally fall into two classes (patricians and plebeians) as conservatives once thought...
...Let's assume that with respect to all these, most people (but different people in each case) cluster around the middle of whatever scale we can construct, with smaller numbers at the lower and higher ends...
...We need to sort out these different forms of payment...
...That's fair enough, and no real threat to equality so long as he can't amass so much money that he becomes a threat to the integrity of the political system and so long as he does not exercise power, tyrannically, over other men and women...
...I am...
...That is why defendants who cannot afford a lawyer are provided with legal counsel by the state: otherwise justice would be up for sale...
...A lawyer is surely entitled to the IN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY respect he wins from his colleagues and to the gratitude and praise he wins from his clients...
...Indeed, given the nature of corporate power in contemporary society, the following statement (to paraphrase Pascal) is false and tyrannical: because I am rich, so I should make decisions and command obedience...
...Great inequalities in political power are acceptable only if they result from a political process of a certain kind, open to argument, closed to bribery and coercion...
...We might distribute income in proportion to susceptibility-to-sickness, or we might make sure that medical care is not for sale at all, but is available to those who need it...
...In its extended form, their argument is that for all our personal and collective resources, there are distributive reasons that are somehow right, that are naturally part of our ideas about the things themselves...
...Why anybody...
...And yet, the distribution of medical care solely for medical reasons would point the way toward an egalitarian society, for it would call the dominance of the income curve dramatically into question...
...And this, it seems to me, is the strongest possible arguMICHAEL WALZER ment for a radical redistribution of wealth...
...Against this view, there is a conventional but also very strong argument that can be made on behalf of enterprise and inventiveness...
...A love for sailing, perhaps, and a willingness to build the boat or to do an equivalent amount of work...
...The clues that we must follow lie in the conceptions we already have, in the things we already know about love and belief, and also about respect, obedience, education, medical care, legal aid, all the necessities of life—for this is no esoteric doctrine, whatever difficulties it involves...
...There is another talent that we need to 400 consider: the ability to make money, the green thumb of bourgeois society—a secondary talent, no doubt, combining many of the others in ways specified by the immediate environment, but probably also a talent which distributes, if we could graph it, along a bell-shaped curve...
...They can't be distributed in equal amounts or given to whoever wants them, for some of them are necessarily scarce, and some of them can't be possessed unless other people agree on the proper name of the possessor...
...Moreover, once this harmony is established, "the political structure —the distribution of political power—follows along the same way...
...The second of these consists in all the side-effects of power: prestige, status, deference, and so on...
...distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, K115 and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends...
...It is often enough, however, to be rich...
...Many of these goods are not in any plausible sense appropriate rewards for the work that is being done...
...I suppose I should have felt, after reading Kristol's piece, that the decent drapery of my socialist convictions has been stripped away, that I was left naked and shivering, small-minded and self-concerned...
...Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one...
...Pascal is wrong to say that "strength is powerless in the kingdom of the wise"— or rather, he is talking of an ideal realm and IN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY not of the intellectual world as we know it...
...nothing else about him is a relevant consideration...
...Not just any bell will do...
...Instead, "human talents and abilities...
...They are equally bad reasons...
...I think all these assertions are false...
...There is nothing degraded about wanting these things...
...Different goods should be distributed to different people for different reasons...
...Like a certain sort of leftist thought, conservative argument seems quickly to shape itself around a rhetoric of motives rather than one of reasons...
...No one can doubt the mastery of the wealthy in the spheres of medicine, justice, and political power, even though these are not their own spheres...
...It is wrong to seek them in any way that is alien to their intrinsic character...
...sometimes for other reasons...
...An executive must make decisions—that's what he is there for—and even decisions seriously affecting other people...
...But in the United States, nature is triumphant: we are perfectly bellshaped...
...Does it require envious intellectuals to see that something is wrong...
...Consider the case of medical care: surely it should not be distributed to individuals because they are wealthy, intelligent, or righteous, but only because they are sick...
...Nor need there be a single distribution of all social goods, for different goods might well be distributed differently...
...Marx makes a very similar argument in one of the early manuscripts...
...I want to argue that in our society the only way to do that, or to begin to do it, is to worry about the tyranny of money...
...The example of medical care, to which I recur, is suggested by him...
...But that would be at best a degrading business, and I doubt that my analysis would be any more accurate than Kristol's...
...Is this "equality of result...
...That he owns the corporation or has been chosen by the owners isn't enough...
...And this will cast a new light on the other rewards of leadership...
...One only wishes that the critics would apply it more generally than they seem ready to do...
...Similarly, learned men don't deserve to be believed: they are believed or not depending on the arguments they make...
...They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it, temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodiness, must be futile in the end...
...For Rawls explicitly accords priority to the "liberty principle" over those other maxims that point toward greater equality...
...But in America today, the distribution of medical care actually follows closely the lines of the income graph...
...Consequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money...
...The second of these is obviously the simpler...
...405 a six-man directorate, or the critics distribute their praise evenly, or the people at the meeting adopt all six proposals...
...Tyranny...
...None of these things can be distributed to individuals in proportion to their needs, for they are not things that anyone (strictly speaking) needs...
...They are merely the rewards that upper classes throughout history have been able to seize and hold for their members...
...But this sort of thing could be prevented only by a very considerable restriction of individual liberty—of the freedom to offer services and to purchase them...
...The American way is exemplary because it derives from or reflects the real inequalities of mankind...
...The Pascal quote is from J. M. Cohen's translation of The Pensees (London and Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1961), no...
...The MICHAEL WALZER same is true of the third form of reward, money itself, which is owed to work, but not necessarily to place and power...
...There are different companies—the strong, the handsome, the intelligent, the devout— and each man reigns in his own, not else 3I am also greatly indebted to Bernard Williams, in whose essay "The Idea of Equality" (first published in Laslett and Runciman, Philosophy, Politics and Society, second series [Oxford: Blackwell, 1962]) a similar argument is worked out...
...How can that be right, when the executive also has a rug on the floor, air-conditioning, a deferential secretary, and enormous personal power...
...But whether it was the smart, the strong, or the righteous who enjoyed all the things that money can buy, the oddity would remain: why them...
...Perhaps I did feel a little like that, for my first im 1 "About Equality," Commentary, November 1972...
...Every human talent should be developed and expressed...
...What I am and can do is, therefore, not at all determined by my individuality...
...In fact, the results will be different, if the men are, and it seems to me that they will be different for the right reasons...
...It's worth focusing again, for example, on the practice of medicine...
...Nor is the willingness of his clients to pay his fees a sufficient reason, for most of them almost certainly think they should be paying less...
...But it is the first task of social science, one would think, to look beyond these appearances...
...He is also concerned, he says, with the fact that equality has suddenly been discovered and is now for the first time being advocated as the chief virtue of social institutions: as if societies were not complex and values ambiguous...
...Our goal should be an end to tyranny, a society in which no man is master outside his sphere...
...In a sense, then, the critique of quotas consists almost entirely of a series of restatements and reiterations of the argument I have been urging in this essay...
...We don't give all due attention to the restaurant owner, however, merely by eating his blintzes...
...If that is so, then we must hope for the appearance of another bell-shaped curve...
...There are other values, however, which they must respect, for money isn't the only or necessarily the most important thing for which work can be exchanged...
...I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman for myself...
...it enables the men and women who possess it to purchase virtually every other sort of social good...
...The obvious answer is also the right one: all those economic goods and services, beyond what is necessary to life itself, which men find useful or pleasing...
...I doubt that there would be a lack of candidates even if we paid them no more than was paid to any other corporation employee...
...I am a detestable, dishonorable, unscrupulous, and stupid man, but money is honored and so also is its possessor...
...The medium of exchange is money, and this is the proper function of money and, ideally, its only function...
...I don't know what discoverers and advocates he has in mind.e But it is worth stressing that equality as I have described it does not stand alone, but is closely related to the idea of liberty...
...What socialists want is a society in which wealth is no longer convertible into social goods with which it has no intrinsic connection...
...He aims to expose egalitarianism as the ideology of envious and resentful intellectuals...
...Again, that's certainly true of some of them, and we all have our own lists...
...The second bell echoes the first...
...The following statements, therefore, are false and tyrannical: "Because I am handsome, so I should command respect...
...Consider the case of the man who builds a better mousetrap, or opens a restaurant and sells delicious blintzes, or does a little teaching on the side...
...Nor is it a panacea for human misfortune, as Marx's last sentence makes clear: it is only meant to suggest a humane form of social accommodation...
...It is more likely to be seen, however, as it is normally seen in political life—as the chief attraction of executive positions...
...To the people on the receiving end of medical and bureaucratic services, race and class are a great deal less important than knowledge, competence, courtesy, and so on...
...Men and women who are ambitious to exercise greater power must collect votes, but they can't do that by purchasing them...
...We know that quotas are wrong, but we also know that the present distribution of wealth makes no moral sense, that the dominance of the income curve plays havoc with legitimate distributive principles, and that quotas are a form of redress no more irrational than the world within which and because of which they are demanded...
...III Let's start with some things that money cannot buy...
...But sometimes they meet, and the strong and the handsome fight for mastery— foolishly, for their mastery is of different kinds...
...In fact, there is no single talent or combination of talents which plausibly entitles a man to every available social good—and there is no single talent or combination of talents that necessarily must win the available goods of a free society...
...His activities recall Dr...
...we don't want votes to be traded in the marketplace, though virtually everything else is traded there, and so we have made it a criminal offense to offer bribes to voters...
...It must be the right one, echoing what might be called the susceptibility-to-sickness curve...
...Surely it is possible, though no doubt difficult, for an intellectual to pay proper respect to the different companies of men...
...At this point, Kristol must add, "however slowly and reluctantly," since he believes that the Soviet economy is moving closer every year to its natural shape, and it is admittedly hard to find evidence that nature is winning out in the political realm...
...VI What is the proper sphere of wealth...
...The difficulty here is that making money is only rarely a form of self-expression, and the money we make is rarely enjoyed for its intrinsic qualities (at least, economists frown upon that sort of enjoyment...
...That is the only society of equals worth having...
...It isn't that every man should get what he deserves—as in the old definition of justice—for desert is relevant only to some of the exchanges that Pascal and Marx have in mind...
...There should be no way of acquiring rare books and sailboats except by working for them...
...There is more to be said, however, if they consistently refuse to do that...
...The same understanding is reflected in 403 our legal system...
...In a long and thoughtful discussion of egalitarianism in the Public Interest, Daniel Bell worries that socialists today are aiming at an "equality of results" instead of the "just meritocracy" (the career open to talents) that he believes was once the goal of leftist and even of revolutionary politics...
...What sorts of things are rightly had in exchange for money...
...We are then invited, as in Irving Kristol's recent Commentary article, to reflect upon the perversity of those who would make the attempt...
...If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person...
...It is precisely the people who are paid or who pay themselves vast sums of money who reap all sorts of other rewards too...
...If men and women wanted to be doctors primarily because they wanted to be helpful, they would have no reason to object when judgments were made about their potential helpfulness...
...Modest proposals, again, but they represent so many moves toward the realization of that old socialist slogan about the abolition of money...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
