Practical Distributivism:  The Just Wage vs. The Just Income

For more than a century, Catholic social teaching has advocated the wider distribution of property as the key to ending poverty. But the Church has never specified the means for accomplishing this, regarding the implementation as a matter falling within the competence of the laity. Many lay Catholics have attempted to give life to these teachings, most notably G. K. Chesterton and Hillarie Belloc in the economic philosophy known as "Distributivism." Distributivism dictates the re-ordering the economic life around the redistribution of capital rather then the redistribution of income. However, Chesterton and Belloc had no real means of attaining the desired distribution, and tied their work to the distribution of land, which made it a form of agrarianism. Though quite popular at one time, the influence of Distributivism has declined in recent years since it stressed the ends without adequately specifying the means.

The reason for the difficulty in discovering the means is not hard to locate. For when we confront the Papal teachings, we are immediately faced with a conundrum. On the one hand, they command the freedom of the market and, on the other, they command the payment of a living wage. Yet a free market sets its prices, even the price for labor, according to the laws of supply and demand, not according to the law of needs and certainly not according to Papal command. It is precisely this point that has made the Church's teaching so problematic; there seemed to be no means by which these competing requirements could be reconciled, and lacking such means, there seems to be no practical application of the teaching.

Sooner or later, we must address the means and address them in a practical and just manner. This task is made easier, I believe, if we first admit that what is unjust is also unstable and therefore inefficient; we must be able to show that without justice, markets fail and misery results. Therefore justice, far from being a hindrance to an efficient and free market, is in fact a requirement. Then we can discuss Distributivism under the unfamiliar rubric of necessity and practicality. This article attempts to pinpoint the practical nexus between morality and the market, to show precisely where this connection is broken, and to suggest ways to restore order and stability to markets so that they may function in practice with the efficiency and justice they promise in principle. I should indicate, by way of full disclosure, that my biases are derived from the free market, insofar as it really is free, and that the solutions proposed are derived from the works of Mortimer Adler, Louis Kelso, Robert Ashford, and Norman Kurland--work that is carried forward at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (http://www.cesj.org/). And since we are speaking of "Distributivism" it is first necessary to show why a just distribution of capital is necessary, so necessary that without it markets are doomed to display injustice at all times and catastrophic failures from time to time in the form of severe depressions.

Say's Law

Depressions occur if the purchasing power of the populace is less than the value of the goods and services produced by the economy; some of the goods and services will then remain unsold, and layoffs and reduced wages must necessarily follow. That this should happen at all in free market is somewhat of a mystery. There is a principle of Classical Economics known as Say's Law of Markets which holds that in a private-property, free-market economy, production necessarily generates income sufficient to purchase that production. Simply put, one man's cost is another man's income; the money spent in production generates the income necessary to clear the market. Since production must be financed, the income must be added to the economy before the goods are produced, and that income will then be available when the goods come to market. In other words, the outputs of the economy will equal the inputs; supply will always generate demand. The value of the inputs of wages, material purchases, and capital will always equal the value of the goods produced, and hence the purchasing power necessary to absorb those goods will always be available. If this were always true, then it follows that, in a truly free market, recession and depressions would be more or less impossible.

Supply side economists regard Say's law as a matter of dogma; it forms the basis of their policies of stimulating investment so that the benefits of increased production can "trickle down" throughout the whole economy in the form of higher production, more jobs and a larger tax base for welfare distribution. For the supply-sider, purchasing power is managed indirectly through the stimulation of production; production provides its own purchasing power. Keynesians and Marxists, on the other hand, deny Say's law and point to the fact that free markets do fail as proof they can fail. They cite endemic unemployment, unsold inventories, and under-utilized production capacity, things that could not exist if the market were truly efficient. Because of this denial, Keynesians favor a "trickle-up" policy, where demand is stimulated through government expenditures and income redistribution. The Keynesian manages purchasing power directly by subsidizing demand, which in turn creates production. The Marxists deny that any amount of tinkering with the current system, be it trickle-up or trickle-down, will stabilize what is essentially an unstable and oppressive system. Given the repeated failures of both supply and demand side policies, they would seem to have a point.[1]

If we deny Say's law, than we must admit with the Marxists that Capitalism can never be more than the misery for the many and wealth for the few which is in fact the real situation in the world today; without Say's law the free market can never be more than that alternation of jubilation and depression known as the business cycle. Falsifying Say's law also has another unpleasant effect: If Say's law is false, then it is likely that the Phillips Curve is true. According to this renowned curve, we can have full employment or we can have low inflation-but we cannot have both. Therefore, that the many may prosper, some few must fail-and fail by government command! It is necessary, we are told, to build into the economy a certain amount of misery in the form of chronic unemployment, and to enforce any deviation from this "necessary misery" with artificially increased interest rates. This principle forms the basis of the monetary policy of the United States.[2] The Phillips curve is an admission that the Marxists and the Keynesians are at least partially right, for if the curve is correct, then free markets can never, even in principle, ensure the economic well- being of all.

Yet the despite the failures of Say's Law, one wonders how it can be false. After all, there would seem to be only three possibilities: Incomes are always less then production, greater then production, or equal to production. If, because of some unknown inefficiencies in the market, incomes are always less, then chronic recession and depression must be the norm of Capitalism and markets cannot be considered efficient. If, due to some alchemy, income is greater than we can simply produce our way to fabulous wealth and everyone will soon have three Mercedes in the driveway and a bad case of gout from high-living. The third possibility, that income equal the outputs, would seem intuitively obvious, yet the obvious principle fails with appalling regularity. What then is the problem? Why is it that tinkering with either supply or demand never seems to work?

The Sources and Distribution of Incomes

It should be obvious by now that there is a flaw in the formulation of Say's Law. For some reason, the income generated by production is insufficient to consume the production. The flaw is the too-easy assumption that all of the economic output is converted to purchasing power. This assumption does not hold up under scrutiny, and it is easily seen that a large portion of potential purchasing power is lost to the economy, with the result that production outstrips consumption and it is necessary to lay off workers, reduce wages, or both, and the economy goes into recession, or worse. The reason for this "leakage" of purchasing power becomes obvious if we examine the way incomes are distributed throughout the economy.

There are exactly two sources of income: labor and capital. The mass of men earn their living through wages, while a small proportion earn their living from capital.[3] Moreover, it is obvious that the rewards of capital and labor are not equal, nor should they be. Both capital and labor are entitled to make just claims on the outputs of the economy. However, it is also obvious that as investment increases capital can justly make a larger and larger claim on the rewards; the "capital" content of production increases much faster than the labor content. Consider, for example, transport. A man with a mule can carry a certain amount of goods a certain distance in a certain time. However, a man with a truck can carry a thousand times the amount of goods a thousand times further in the same time. The contribution of the truck (a capital investment) to production makes possible a huge increase in the output of the economy. It is obvious that the labor portion of each delivery must decline while the capital portion increases. Therefore, the proportion of the output from each delivery that goes to capital will increase, and the proportion that goes to labor will decrease. It does not matter that, in absolute terms, the wage of the truck driver exceeds that of the muleskinner; we are only concerned here with the proportion of the total income that goes to the two inputs. If capital gets its "due share" of the rewards, it is obvious that it will be an increasing share, even if, due to increased productiveness, the absolute amount going to both capital and labor increases.

This differential in the distribution of rewards has important consequences for purchasing power. Since an increasing share of the rewards must go to capital (otherwise there would be no incentive to invest) and since only a small minority earns significant capital rewards, whether from interest, dividends, or capital gains, therefore a larger and larger share must go to a minority of men who already have most of their daily needs met by existing income; hence a smaller and smaller proportion of their incomes will go to consumption and a diminishing share of their rewards are realized in the economy as "purchasing power." Now we may precisely pinpoint the failure of Say's Law. For while the economy in theory is in balance, in practice a large and ever-increasing portion of purchasing power is lost by not being converted to consumption, with a result that aggregate purchasing power will fall short of the amount needed to sustain the economy. The Law that, in theory, is intuitively obvious is, in practice, thwarted solely by a poor distribution of income.

Nor is that all. As a smaller proportion of capital income goes to consumption, an increasing share will go to new investments, investment intended, for the most part, to further decrease the labor content and increase the capital content of any product.[4] Thus a spiral is set up in which the capital seeks to increase its content, and with it the just claims that capital may make upon the rewards. When this happens at a time that purchasing power is already falling short, we may call this, as Louis Kelso does, "morbid capital." This morbid capital can have no other effect than draining further purchasing power from the market, and thus sending the economy into a "death spiral" from which the economy cannot recover until some way is found to restore purchasing power, such as a major war or a new found source of wealth.

Here then we can clearly see the nexus between morality and economics. Morality tells us that each man ought be able to earn enough to support his family; economics tells us that it is necessary that he do so. A failure of the ethical requirement is also a failure of the economic requirement. At this point it is no longer a question of pitting the ethical against the economic, but of examining the choices available to us to determine which solutions best meet the requirements of both ethics and economics. These choices appear to resolve themselves into two groups: schemes for redistributing income and methods for redistributing capital.

Income Redistribution

Conservatives are convinced that income redistribution schemes are Liberal and Socialist plots to weaken both the freedom of the market and the moral fabric of the citizenry. While conservatives are correct that these schemes have these effects, they are not at all nefarious plots, but something forced on business and government leaders by cold, hard necessity-the necessity of keeping purchasing power in the economy and staving off collapse. Whatever the ideological stripe of the political party in power, they all end up as a party to these schemes out of sheer necessity. These schemes fall into three groups: artificially increasing the price of labor, government transfer payments or the subsidy of necessary services, and consumer credit.

Under the heading of artificially increasing the price of labor we may include such things as the minimum wage, restrictive union, and requirements for all sorts of benefits, such as health care. All of these schemes, to the extent that they are not freely chosen, abrogate the freedom of the market and concede that that labor, by itself, earns enough neither to support the worker and his family nor to maintain the economy. As much as people rail against such interference in the free market, this interference is accepted by business and government leaders alike because no other solution seems to present itself.

Transfer payments we include social security, various welfare programs, food programs, charitable programs (both public and private), support of basic services such as schools and health care, farm price supports, etc. Once again, the very existence of these programs concedes that labor in the aggregate is unlikely to earn enough to feed itself, educate its children, provide for its old age, and take care of itself in sickness. The degree to which these programs have passed beyond the realm of debate was indicated by the recent presidential campaign, where the differences on health care were not about whether to have a government funded program, but only about the size and shape such a program would take. As in so many other areas of economic life, the "if" of government subsidies is no longer debated, only the "how much." This shifting of the debate from the "whether or not" to the "how much," which has already taken place in so many areas of economic life, (education, health care, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, etc.) would seem to indicate that conservatives can never do more than fight rear- guard actions; in each case the power of government over the economy and our lives is vastly increased. With these increases in government and corporate power, economic initiative and individual liberty must decrease.

Conservatism under the current regime would thus appear doomed to function as no more than a "brake" on the irresistible advance of collectivizing tendencies, tendencies made imperative by the economy's failure to provide the worker with the purchasing power necessary to sustain either himself and his family or the equilibrium of the economy. It is the structure of the economy which dictates the range of actions available to the political system; that range has narrowed so much that it hardly makes any difference, economically, who is in office. The debate between supply-side and demand-side economics is really a debate between left-wing and right-wing Liberalism; that is, no more than a debate between subsidizing business and subsidizing consumers. The state has, of necessity, become welfare-mercantilist with power alternating between the welfare and mercantilist factions. Conservatism, so intellectually fecund, becomes politically impotent, except when it becomes "compassionate," i.e., "liberal." Conservatives are occasionally heartened by small successes, such as the recent efforts to reduce the welfare roles. However, whether or not one credits the claims of success for these initiatives, there remains the question of how much of this "success" is due to the labor shortage in a rapidly expanding economy, and whether the welfare roles will again expand as the economy goes into recession-as it inevitably will. Further, as long as the government maintains the policy of forced unemployment dictated by the Phillips Curve and enforced by the Federal Reserve, it seems only just that the government remains involved in the relief of poverty attributable to its own policies.

As problematic as government action is, the most dangerous method of addressing the problem of insufficient purchasing power comes from the free market itself. This dangerous solution is the use of massive amounts of unsecured consumer credit. Such credit, while it adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the current purchasing power of the economy, is supported by no productive asset other then the future earning power of the worker. As such, while it represents a current increase in purchasing power, it does so only by decreasing future purchasing power. Further, the future ability to purchase must be reduced not only by the amount of current purchases, but also by an amount equal to the interest demanded by the amount of risk involved. As this is unsecured and uninsured debt, that risk is very high and the high interest rates reflect it. Such unsecured credit, when it is so pervasive in the economy, can never be more than a ponzi scheme, which at some point must have, as all ponzi schemes must, a day of reckoning.[5]

All of these schemes not only distort the free market in themselves, but also dictate a system of high taxes which further distorts the free market and aggrandizes government power over our lives. However, these schemes are clearly forced on us by the structure of the current economy and are not likely to change, regardless of the party in power, until and unless there are some fundamental structural changes which address the problem of distribution. As long as the purchasing power obtainable by labor cannot support either itself or the economy, other means will have to be found.

The Just Wage vs. The Just Income

Catholic social teaching has always acknowledged the problem of the shortage of purchasing power among the mass of workers; the Church therefore commands that the worker be paid a "just wage", defined as not only the amount necessary to support a worker and his family, but also enough surplus to allow a man to acquire some capital of his own (Rerum Novarum, 63). And it is not only Papal doctrine, but also common sense and common humanity that upholds this principle. However, the market responds neither to Papal command, nor to sense and humanity, but operates according to its own internal logic, a logic that compels it to seek every commodity, including labor, at the lowest possible rate. Thus there would appear to be a deep conflict between the requirements of conscience and the requirements of the market. It is somewhat ironic to note that it is often the Keynesian and the Marxist who, however unwittingly and naively, attempt to implement Papal teaching via schemes of income redistribution, while the Catholic conservative often undermines this same teaching by upholding the rights of the market to pay labor as little as possible.

Is there anyway to reconcile the requirements of the market with the requirements of conscience, to join the Keynesian and the conservative in a common program? If this cannot be done, then the complaints of the Communist must go unanswered, and we must admit that capitalism can never be more than an unjust and unstable system. However, I think an answer is available, an answer that arises from a proper consideration of Say's Law, that is, from regarding the operation of this law as a function of the distribution of income.

We recall that while most men derive their income from wages, only a small minority derive significant income from capital, and precisely a minority unlikely to convert the income to purchase, a fact which causes a "leakage" of purchasing power. As we have seen, this leakage tends to grow larger as the economy expands due to increased capital investment, which makes over-production (or under-consumption) an inevitability. Thus the answer would seem obvious: spread the benefits of capital ownership as widely as possible throughout the populace and to such a degree that a significant portion of the worker's income is derived from capital. The rewards of capital, no longer limited to a small minority, would more likely be converted to purchasing power and the requisite harmony would be restored to the economy; Say's Law would function as Say says. Further, the question of the "just wage" would become less relevant; any diminution in the wage would add directly to the reward of capital, and therefore the income of the worker, if not the wage, would be maintained.[6] The employer would be free to seek a market price for labor, while the worker's income would be maintained at a just level. Further, this "just income" would also provide the purchasing power required to stabilize the economy.

The problem of the "just wage" is therefore addressed not by interfering with the market, but by using market mechanisms to more adequately distribute the rewards. We therefore replace the concept of the just wage with the just income. This solution is already implicit in Catholic teaching. The popes everywhere indicate that the solution involves allowing the worker to acquire some capital of his own, in amounts sufficient to ensure his financial stability. The Church thereby acknowledges a fact known to every investor: real wealth and real financial stability comes not from wages but from capital. As long as the concentration is on wages alone, then workers will never acquire real ownership of productive capital nor will the economy distribute the rewards in a manner sufficiently broad to ensure stability. The living wage addresses only half the problem; the living income addresses the real issues of income maintenance from the standpoint both of the worker and of the economy as a whole.

The Impediments to Ownership

Once we grant that a wider distribution of ownership will work better from the standpoints of both justice and of economics, we are faced with the problem of how to accomplish it. Merely seizing on concentrations of wealth and re-distributing them would be a violation of justice. It would also be counter-productive as capital investment would immediately dry-up and the worker would be left with only worthless pieces of paper and no job to boot. If ownership is to be redistributed, it must be accomplished on free market principles; it will do us no good to destroy the market in the process of saving it. If we wish workers to share the benefits of the free market, we must first of all do our best to preserve that market. Redistribution, if it takes place at all, must do so on purely market principles.

The solution of classical or neo-classical economics for the distribution of wealth is that people restrain their consumption through savings in order to acquire the collateral necessary to purchase stock. As the old saying has it, "it takes money to make money." For most people, this constitutes an insurmountable barrier. Lacking sufficient collateral, they simply cannot acquire sufficient credit to participate in any meaningful way in the benefits of capital ownership; no matter how frugal, their savings can at best provide them with retirement income, but are insufficient to supplement their income during their working lives. This collateralization requirement provides the greatest bar to the distribution of ownership. Because of it, the acquisition of capital is limited mainly to those who already have capital. There is no re-distribution taking place, and certainly not on the scale necessary to address the problems of income distribution and the stability of the capitalist system. Moreover, even if people could save a sufficient amount to acquire significant capital to significantly supplement their wage incomes, the effect would actually be counter-productive. Imagine, if you will, that the savings rate among workers were suddenly to rise to, say, 25%. Such an increase in savings could only come at the expense of consumption. In an economy already dependent upon massive consumer credit and income redistribution schemes, such an eventuality would be disastrous; purchasing would dry up and with it, the economy. There would be any amount of money for investment, but only a limited amount for the consumption that makes investment profitable.

It is important to note here that although collateral is required, it is not really the collateral that purchases the capital. That is done through OPM (other people's money), that is to say, through borrowing. The collateral is claimed only if the enterprise should fail or if the proceeds from the investment are insufficient to liquidate the debt. Capital investing is normally self-liquidating. The investment pays both for itself and for the interest on the debt used to purchase it. The collateral functions strictly as insurance. After the debt and its interest is paid, the full benefits of ownership accrue to the investor, even though he may not actually have spent any of his own money.

The result of all this is that capital credit is limited to those who already possess capital because it is existing capital that provides collateral. Thus the relative distribution of capital is likely only to worsen rather than improve. Even the much-touted widespread ownership of stocks and bonds has not changed the relative distribution of wealth in this country (or any other) and certainly not in an amount sufficient to provide the distribution of purchasing power necessary to stabilize capitalism. Moreover, the hurdle of collateralization raises the question of whether the market for capital is actually a "free" market. If we recall that one of the requirements for a free market is that there be no barriers to entry, we can easily see that a market limited to possessors of capital alone can never be a free market, and free market considerations simply do not apply. Thus a democratization of capital credit would not only spread the benefits of ownership, but also would free the capital market itself and restructure the very way we think about investing. But how is this democratization of credit to be accomplished?

The Democratization of Capital Credit

Oddly enough, credit in this economy is already highly democratized, but it is precisely the wrong kind of credit. One thinks oneself economically deprived indeed if a week goes by without a credit card solicitation arriving in the mail. However, this kind of credit, unsecured and at ruinous interest rates, is like a drug; it makes the economy both more dependent on it and more unstable. It is the credit advanced by Chesterton's "Higgins the Heathen," who "lends the poor that funny cash that makes them poorer still." Is there a way to lend the poor cash that will actually enrich them?

So long as the bar to acquiring capital is the possession of capital, there does not seem to be a way around the problem. But it fair to ask whether the collateralization requirement is something fixed and immutable; is there a way to dispense with it and still make sound lending decisions? The solution has already been hinted at. Insofar as the debt is based on productive assets, it is self- liquidating; that is, one does not really need money to purchase it, one merely needs the "insurance" of collateral to guarantee the debt in case of failure. If the insurance could be obtained in some other way, the collateralization requirement would disappear, and credit could be opened up to men of meager means. Does such a vehicle exist?

 As it turns out, such insurance not only exists, it is quite common, especially in the housing market. Most Home loans involve an insurance policy which guarantees the loan. The buyer pays a premium to the insurance company which in turn guarantees the loan to the bank. The bank makes market loans with some portion of the collateral provided by insurance. The same technique which has "democratized" the housing market would certainly work in other capital markets.

Collateralization can also be provided in other ways, such as is done in Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), which function in a manner similar to a leveraged buy-out, using the company itself as collateral. In an ESOP, an employee trust fund is set up to borrow money to invest in the company on behalf of the employees. The loan is a normal bank loan and is repaid with the proceeds of the investment. By law, these loans are tax-advantaged in that they are paid with pre-tax profits[7]. The company receives its money from the employee trust fund and provides shares in the company as collateral for the loan. The dividends repay the loan. When the loan is repaid, the shares are distributed to the employees as a benefit of their work. As owners, they have full rights and control of the shares; they may hold them and retain the dividends, or sell them to realize a capital gain and invest in other enterprises. Over time, the employees come to be majority holders of the company, or holders of equivalent amounts in other companies, if they have decided to sell their shares.[8]

The ESOP has been in existence for over 30 years. Hence it is no longer an innovation, but a time tested investment tool whose results can be fully evaluated without any guesswork or speculation. But the ESOP itself is merely a test bed for similar investment vehicles which have the power to solve the distribution problem within capitalism and make the system more just and hence more stable. Ideally, the stock issued by an ESOP would be full-payout shares, which pays out its full value minus reserves for depreciation. Other plans that could be implemented along the same lines are a Consumer Stock Ownership Plan (CSOP) (intended for consumers of public utilities), Individual Stock Ownership Plans (ISOP) (which functions similar to an IRA), Community Investment Corporation (CIC) (designed to provide investment to local community projects with ownership going to the residents.) One can imagine any number of such investment vehicles which would benefit both the businessman and the worker in a myriad of ways. All of these plans have a number of features in common. In the first place, they are free market plans: no one is forced to do anything. Current owners keep what they own, if they like, while only new growth goes to the employees or other participating investors. The purchase itself is not funded by tax monies, but is based on market decisions made by lending institutions in exactly the same way that they make such decisions today.

Currently these plans are not extended because of the collateralization requirements. In the case of the ESOP, the collateral is actually provided by the company itself, in return for a lower cost of credit and a tax-advantaged source of capital. That the collateralization requirement can be replaced by insurance, in a manner consistent with a free market, we already know from private mortgage insurance. Moreover, it is already within the power of the Federal Reserve System to monetize these loans, a power the central bank already has but does not exercise. The role the Fed can play, should play, in providing democratic credit to the economy will be critical. It is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with these issues, except to point out that the lending and monetary infrastructures already exist; it is only necessary to have the will to use them.

The Benefits to Capitalists and to Capitalism

The benefits to the business include not only a more loyal and motivated workforce and a self-financing retirement program, but also a convenient and cheap source of capital. But the major benefit is not so much to the capitalist, but to capitalism. We have already noted that the system, as it currently operates, cannot by itself provide the necessary self-sustaining purchasing power to guarantee its own stability. It must and does rely on massive government redistribution schemes and massive consumer credit, solutions which distort the economy in the short run and which must fail in the long run. The thing about the long run is that it gets shorter every day, with the day of reckoning always one day closer.

But the major benefit to capitalism is that it creates more capitalists. To the extent that people derive their income directly from capital, and not merely indirectly through the wages capitalists are willing (or able) to pay, the workers become an integral part of the system, a system which spreads its benefits among the many rather than the few. Moreover it resolves the conflicts between supply-side and demand-side economics. Each of these theories is unitary, working on one side of the equation only. But any economy is binary, involving both production and consumption, capital and demand. Distributivism, as it is described in this paper, works on both sides: it stimulates investment through new sources of capital credit; it stimulates consumption through dispersion of purchasing power throughout the population. It is therefore a binary system, and a more complete description of the economy.

The Practical Distributivist

Distributivists base their economics on the most realistic and hardheaded premise imaginable: power follows property. Without economic democracy, political democracy will be a sham, as insubstantial as a dimpled chad. Neither party can do more than what the economy allows them to do, and the range of choices is rapidly narrowing. We are not uians seeking a panacea to poverty, ignorance, and decease, or a magic bullet with which to eliminate the sins of man. Rather, we know instinctively that any economic system must be based on the way people really are, and not as we wish them to be. We refuse to separate the moral and economic realms, forcing people to choose one or the other, but realize that they must be the same or be nothing at all. And finally, unlike supply-siders or Keynesians, we operate on both sides of the economic equations, providing a binary and therefore more complete description of the economy.

Yet professional economists are prone to regard us as hopeless romantics. The fault, I suspect, lies not in the economists but in ourselves. Too easily consumed by the justice of the case, we have often failed to provide the hard theoretical basis necessary to convert the principles into practice, into policies and laws. But we have, I believe, too high a calling to allow ourselves this luxury. Justice is as necessary to the economy as money, and we must never cease to point this out, and to do so on purely practical and empirical grounds. We must be willing to crunch the numbers with the best of them, to lobby for specific and attainable political and economic laws, we must perform the hard labor of economics, and do it better than the economists.