The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [136]
This conclusion doesn’t mean that we have to oppose all inequalities. It means that we have to reject all arguments for inequality that turn on the moral right to what we earn, together with the mistaken idea that we earn anything at all. Other parts of core morality provide some justification for limited inequalities in wealth, income, and other advantages between people, but mainly when these inequalities have spillover effects for everyone else. For example, core morality may morally justify paying doctors more than, say, movie reviewers. It is more difficult to qualify as a doctor and sometimes more unpleasant to be one. But it is also more important for all of us that the people most qualified by their talents and abilities become doctors. Of course, even if you accept this argument, and most people would, it may not seem to you like an argument from core morality at all. Rather, it looks like a practical or prudent argument for paying doctors more than others. Scientism won’t have any trouble with such arguments, even if they are not really moral ones.
Scientism can even endorse some economists’ arguments that inequalities are an indispensable part of the only economic system workable in a large society: free-market capitalism. There is a very good argument that only a free market can give people the right incentives to work efficiently and consume rationally. Suppose you combine this conclusion with the fact that people really do differ substantially in talents and abilities, ambition and industry. What do you get? The combination inevitably results in ever-increasing inequality. Even if everyone starts out with the same resources, after enough time has passed, free-market trade will make some people a lot wealthier than others. This is simply because they have skills that are in demand and the willingness to use them.
These inequalities, the economist may argue, are unavoidable. Mathematical economists have proof that the free market distributes scarce resources in the most efficient way to make people better off: it always produces the largest quantity of the kind of goods that people really want. No nonmarket economy can do this. The twentieth-century laboratories of centralized planning at its worst (the Soviet collectivization of farms? China in the Great Leap Forward?) and its best (Cuba or East Germany?) seem to have vindicated the mathematical economist’s proof. Of course, this is not a moral argument for establishing a market economy. To make it a moral argument, you need to find some norm or rule in core morality that requires making most people as well off as possible. Is there such a rule?
Many people think there is a part of core morality that does require we make people better off if we can. Now we have a moral argument for inequalities even when morally unearned, because they are unavoidable in an institution, the free market, that provably makes most people better off. But if we take seriously the economist’s argument for the benefits of a free market, we are going to have to engage in significant and regular interference redistributing wealth to keep it efficient.
The economist’s proof that the free market is the best way to provide the most of what people really want requires that no one trading in the market become so rich and powerful that they can manipulate prices: no monopolist seller, no monopoly buyer (a monopsonist), nor any small number of buyers or sellers so powerful that they can get together to set prices above or below the free-market price. But every real market inevitably produces such “price setters.” Why?
As already noted, there are significant inequalities in (unearned) talents, abilities, and ambitions among producers and consumers. Therefore, the free market will inevitably generate