Should Wealth be Distributed Evenly?

Wealth is a subject on the minds of many. To say that wealth is desirable is about as obvious as a statement can be. As I tell my students if they object, if you have a lot of wealth, you can always give it to your favorite charity (the publisher of Public Discourse, obviously). Yet for something so universally desired, wealth generates a lot of controversy. Why? In this and succeeding essays, we will isolate the aspects of the wealth debate in order to figure this out.

Much of the perennial controversy surrounding wealth is about the way it’s distributed. What is the proper distribution of wealth in a society? Would a random distribution be acceptable? If you casually ask people, there are two popular answers: 1) distribute it equally and 2) distribute it to whoever earned it. Which one is just? It is amazing how quickly discussions of this matter revert to the oft-debated: “Capitalism: Good or Evil?”

But, this discussion of capitalism is a red herring. Aristophanes, the fifth-century-BC comic Greek playwright, devoted an entire play to the matter. This play was written roughly two thousand years before there was anything that anyone would describe as a capitalist economic system, but the issues in the play about just distribution of wealth remain relevant today. Understanding this question of wealth distribution seems essential to building a good society, regardless of how its economy is organized.

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