In modern democracies, where majorities rule and the poor are far from a majority, the poor are not the principal beneficiaries of a redistributionist state. At first, perhaps, the middle class is. But any attempt to impose upon society a politically determined, government-approved allocation of wealth—and with it, of opportunity—will, over time, favor the wealthy because a redistributionist state inevitably distributes upward. This means that such government is inherently regressive; it tends to distribute power and money to the strong—including, first and foremost, itself. Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplementing, and even supplanting, markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore ameliorative government becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage. When government embraces redistribution, it summons into existence factions eager to get in on the action. Government constantly expands under the unending, intensifying pressures to correct what it and its many client groups disapprove: the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government, prompted by its own preferences or those of clients, presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, politics becomes a maelstrom of infinite appetites in competition for finite resources. The result is that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government’s distributional activities that are intended to promote harmony, or are advertised as so intended.

Will, George F.. The Conservative Sensibility . Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

print