Where Does Inequality Come From?
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/where-does-inequality-come-from
Asked in April 2001 to defend the “justice” of the deeply unequal society he presided over, Blair explained:
When you say where is the justice in that, the justice for me is concentrated on lifting incomes of those that don’t have a decent income. It’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.
Though Blair pivots smoothly, that second instance of “justice” functions rhetorically. #Justice, as Plato observed long ago, concerns an interrelation of parts, not merely the amelioration of the indigent. Note how cleverly Blair chooses a sports celebrity, who got rich quasi-magically, rather than a businessman or banker, whose fortunes were made with other people’s labor and by virtue of the #deregulation and privatization of the British economy. When detached from a theory of how wealth and poverty connect, charity, even public charity, aspires to communal improvement rather than distributive justice. The goal of alleviating poverty had entirely replaced a vision of an equal society.