Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

PROGRESSIVE TAXATION 389
executive has far more power than someone who earns or inherits an
exceptional sum. The 'power' of the three or four experts in a modern
democracy able to suggest at what point tax progression should assume
confiscatory proportions is indubitably and considerably greater by
comparison than the power of a widow who has inherited a few millions
from her husband.
To claim 'humanitarian motives,' when the true motive is envy and its
supposed appeasement, is a favourite rhetorical device of politicians
today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years. Twenty years
ago an Australian premier, for instance, declared in Parliament:
... seven years ago, about £17 million was being expended each year on
social service benefits. This year, social services will cost about £88
million. I do not deny that this scheme involves a redistribution of the
national wealth, and I make no apology for the fact. Our policy arises from
humanitarian motives, which many other people must share, because otherwise
we should not have been returned to power at the last two elections. We
aim to compel those who can well afford to do so, to surrender some of their
income to help those who do the hard and tedious work of the country ....
The workers are the people who really make the wheels go round ....
These were the closing words of the Budget Debate on September 29,
1948, by the then Prime Minister J. B. Chifley. Fittingly, they were also
the closing words, so to speak, for the Labour Party's rule in that country
until today. Electorates seem far less grateful for this concern for their
presumed envy than politicians always seem to think. The fact that envy
as an imputed motive to most members of a society is as inherent in the
preference for progressive taxation as it is untenable logically and pragmatically
has been emphasized by serious scholars again and again. In
1953 two professors at the Law School of the University of Chicago,
Blum and Kalven, published a slim volume under the title The Uneasy
Case for Progressive Taxation, in which they asked what our attitude
towards 'equality' would have to be
if by a convenient miracle the wealth and output of society trebled overnight
without any changes in its relative distribution among individuals.
Would the issue oflessening inequality ... appear any less urgent? ... what
is involved is envy, the dissatisfaction produced in men not by what they