…. is from page 283 of George Will’s insight-filled 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility:
When government embraces redistribution, it summons 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 are intended to promote harmony, or are advertised as so intended.
When government embraces redistribution, it summons 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 are intended to promote harmony, or are advertised as so intended.DBx: Yes. As F.A. Hayek might say: government’s chasing the mirage of ‘social justice’ results in government carpet-bombing society with individual – and very real – injustices.
Or as Thomas Sowell might put it: the quest for cosmic justice produces actual injustices.
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