From: David M (davidint@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 19:55:07 BST
Arlo
GA Cohen in the Philosophers magazine:
socialist or capitalist?
In 1981 an American political theorist called Joseph Carens published a book
called Equality, Moral Incentives and the Market. Carens designs a society
which is capitalist in the sense that prices determine what people do and
people are trying to maximise their incomes in the usual way, as in a
capitalist society, but where the state then taxes everyone so that
everybody ends up with exactly the same income. In that society people
respond to prices because they know that a society is productive when people
do so but not because of the reward associated with that response in a
capitalist society, since, although the reward goes to them in the first
instance in Carens's society, so that market efficiency functions in the
normal way, ultimately it gets taken away by the state and the only reason
why they sought it was because they all believe in replicating the
efficiency properties of capitalism: none of them are greedy.
DM
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