It should be similarly evident that exact equality of incomes in money or in goods for all persons is not less wasteful, or less socially injurious.
I cannot profess to understand by what reasoning some so-called Socialists defend an ideal order in which every member of society, man, woman and child, should have an absolutely equal share of the general income.The needs of people, their capacity to get utility out of incomes by consuming it, are no more equal than their powers of production.Neither in respect of food, or clothing, or the general material standard of comfort, can any such equality of needs be alleged.To say that a big strong man, giving out a correspondingly large output of energy, needs exactly the same supply of food as a small weakly man, whose output is a third as great, would be as ridiculous as to pretend that a fifty-horse power engine needed no more fuel than a ten-horse power one.Nor will the differences in one set of needs be closely compensated in another.Mankind is not equal in the sense that all persons have the same number of faculties developed, or capable of development, to the same extent, and demanding the same aggregate amount of nutriment.To maintain certain orders of productive efficiency will demand a much larger consumption than to maintain others.Because differences of income and expenditure exist at present which are manifestly unjust and injurious, that is no reason for insisting that all differences are unwarrantable.Equality of opportunity does not imply equality but some inequality of incomes.For opportunity does not consist in the mere presence of something which a man can use, irrespective of his own desires and capacities.A banquet does not present the same amount of opportunity to a full man as to a hungry man, to an invalid as to a robust digestion.
£1,000, spent in library equipment for university students, represents far more effective opportunity than the same sum spent on library equipment in a community where few can read or care to read any book worth reading.
Equality of opportunity involves the distribution of income according to capacity to use it, and to assume an absolute equality of such capacity is absurd.
It may no doubt be urged that it is difficult to measure individual needs and capacities so as to apply the true organic mode of distribution.
This is true and any practical rules for adjusting income, or for distribution of the product, according to needs, will be likely to involve some waste.
But that is no reason for adopting a principle of distribution which must involve great waste.However difficult it may be to discover and estimate differences of needs in individuals or classes of men, to ignore all differences insures a maximum of waste.For, assuming, as it does, a single average or standard man, to which type no actual man conforms, it involves a necessary waste in each particular case.Everyone, in a word, would under this mechanical interpretation of equality possess either a larger or a smaller income than he could use.Such a doctrine, though sometimes preached by persons who call themselves socialists, is really a survival of the eighteenth-century doctrine of individual rights, grafted on to a theory of the uniformity of human nature that is contradicted by the entire trend of science.
This levelling doctrine only serves to buttress the existing forms of inequality, by presenting in the guise of reform a spurious equality, the folly and the waste of which are obvious even to the least reflecting of mankind.
§4.Distribution of income according to needs, or ability to use it, does not, indeed, depend for its practical validity upon the application of exact and direct measurements of needs.The limits of any sort of direct measurement even of material needs appear in any discussion of the science of dietetics.But inexact though such science is, it can furnish certain valid reasons for different standards of food in different occupations, and for other discriminations relating to race, age, sex and vigour.What holds of food will also hold of housing, leisure, modes of recreation and intellectual consumption.Nor must it be forgotten that, for expenditure, the family is the true unit.The size and age of the family is certainly a relevant factor in estimating needs, and in any distribution on a needs basis must be taken into account.
Public bodies, and less commonly private forms, in fixing salaries and wages,are consciously guided by such considerations.The idea is to ascertain the sum which will maintain a worker, with or without a family, in accordance with economic efficiency, and having regard to the accepted conventions of the class from which he will be drawn.Having determined this 'proper' salary or wage, they seek to get the best man for the work.
It is true that the conventional factor looms so big in this process as often to obscure the natural economy.When it is determined by a municipality that its Town Clerk ought ot have £1500 a year and its dustman 22s.
