Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

300 THE SENSE OF JUSTICE AND THE IDEA OF EQUALITY
emancipated proteges to the residual inequality between the highly
educated products of schools for the elite and those with only average
education.
In socialist economists such as Abba P. Lerner, we find the envymotive
used indirectly, appearing now as a social virtue. Thus, a
progressively rising income tax is proposed on the grounds that, for the
psychological good of the collective, the appeasement of envy in the
normal wage-earner-on witnessing the penalties of the highly paidwas
quantitatively more important and beneficial than the discomfiture
of the few, despoiled by the state for the benefit of the envious. 30 This
thesis overlooks the fact that there are countless, and often far more
painful, occasions for envy than those few really large incomes or
inheritances which can be mulcted; it also overlooks the fact that by
raising envy to the status of virtue in the interests of the state one only
intensifies the suffering of those with a truly envious disposition because
politicians feel compelled continually to reveal new 'inequalities'
in the society.
As these envious people look around them, they become aware of
innumerable other inequalities to which they react with envy and which
they would therefore like to see eliminated. It becomes increasingly
difficult to persuade them that they, and they alone, must endeavour to
solve their problem of envy, that no one is duty-bound to provide them
with a society in which there would be no occasion for envy-quite aside
from the fact that such a society would be impossible.
30 A. P. Lerner, The Economics of Control, New York, 1944. Here we find the claim
that the most effective means to improve the situation of the needy individual, B, is
simply to diminish Ks prosperity, and not (which is usually impossible anyway) to
transfer his property to B. On p. 36, for example, Lerner points out that-according to
his own-theory-the satisfaction of B is conditional not only on his own income, but
also on that of A. If something is taken away from A in order to supplement what B has,
a great advance towards the welfare state had been made.
Supposing A were then to take umbrage and put in less time at work, a progressive
income tax could, Lerner suggests, simply be extended to that part of Ks income which
he would have earned had he taken less time off (p. 237).
' ... those cases where an increase in the consumption of products by one person
diminishes the satisfaction of another, are quite another story. These cases exist
wherever'invidious' expenditure occurs .... In fine, assuming that the satisfaction of
one person does not depend on the consumption of any other involves the complete
obscuration of all problems of prestige, jealousy [sic!] etc .... ' (pp. 65 f.).