Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

122 What To Make of Itnations offered at least stingy forms of relief, as in ElizabethanEngland. They thus have acknowledged, althoughthey have not yet successfully countered, the unacceptableconsequences of the rule.Fourth, the rule plainly distributes income and wealthunequally. In the United States, 1 percent of the people ownroughly a third of the nation’s wealth. In Latin America as awhole, the top 10 percent receive 40 percent of the nationalincome, the bottom 30 percent receive less than 8 percent.For some observers, that fact alone leads them to an adversejudgment about the market. Others grant a defect but counton such nonmarket programs as old-age pensions and theother programs just mentioned to achieve satisfactory reductionsof inequalities. And still others defend existingmarket inequalities. They acknowledge poverty as a problembecause it represents an extreme of inequality, but theydo not think that inequality short of poverty constitutes aproblem.Within nations, a slow historical movement away fromsevere old inequalities appears to respond to two intertwinedsources: one, an ethical tradition—in the West, the Greek-Judeo-Christian tradition—and, the other, democratic politics.The movement is of course always stubbornly resisted,mainly by those who fear losing their large shares.One can play down market inequality as a blight on thegrounds that nonmarket systems reveal a history of evengreater inequality or that communist systems, for all theirideology of equality, continue to practice severe inequality.But that does not deny the magnitude of market inequality.Nor does the impossibility of complete or exact equalityjustify such existing inequality as follows from the rule ofquid pro quo.