Chapter Ǵǹ: Can a Liberal Be an Egalitarian? ȃȅȄwealthy does not enable a person to coerce others or to restrict the oppor-
tunities open to them. His ability to offer them financially attractive deals
is not the same as power to deprive them of alternatives they would have
had anyway. Ļe situation would be different if one person or group, or a
very few of these, accounted for a large enough fraction of national income
or wealth to possess monopoly power in dealing with other people. Ļen,
however, the unsatisfactory condition would be precisely this monopoly
power and it would confuse the issue to talk about inequality instead.
When a country has several thousand separate individuals or families of
great wealth, it is almost a contradiction in terms to speak ofconcentration
of wealth or power in their hands. On the contrary, the existence of sev-
eral thousand pillars of economic strength, many of them able and some
of them willing to support causes and persons that may be unpopular with
the general public and with the government, may be of great value in pre-
serving a free society.
Another motive for egalitarianism might be the belief that a marginal
dollar adds less to the utility of a rich person than of someone else and
that redistribution might accordingly increase total social utility. Besides
taking some old-fashioned strands of economic theory too seriously, this
argument blinks the ethical question whether an involuntary transfer can
be justified by the mere fact or conjecture that the gainers gain more than
the losers lose. A more plausible version of the argument is that the surplus
of the rich can be taken for such socially important purposes as building
and running schools and hospitals. In considering this argument, we must
distinguish between two cases, though the analysis does not hinge on any
exact dividing line between them. First, suppose that those who benefit
from the schools and hospitalsȃare so poor that they could not pay for
them without trenching painfully on consumption of still more urgent
necessities: they could not pay by ordinary private purchase of schooling
and hospitalization, through premiums on private or governmental insur-
ance, by taxes, or in any other way. Ļe problem is then one of their actual
poverty, and rhetoric about schools and hospitals in particular beclouds
the issue. Most liberals would favor measures to relieve actual poverty;
but precisely because it is in almost everyone’s interest to live in a society
arrangements adopted in their pursuit, do and which do not conduce to the irreducibly
basic end of human happiness.
ȃĻese beneficiaries are of course likely to include people beyond those who actually
use the schools and hospitals—the externalities involved are familiar—and I am not nec-
essarily implying that the entire cost should be charged to the actual users alone.