Nature's Evil

What is the moral justification for inequality? A good worker should live well, so that he’ll work even harder. But the problem is deeper. Adam Smith hoped that, although any individual’s action could lead to evil, myriads of their transactions would bring good. John Maynard Keynes believed that the concentration of wealth enables massive investment in ‘fixed capital’, or infrastructure. The railways would not have been built, wrote Keynes, if capital had been equally distributed. 41 In 1971, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls formulated two principles of justice. It is fine if the rich become even richer, in accordance with Rawls’s first principle, only if the poor become less poor in accordance with his second. Since the era of Rawls and Reagan, the total effect has been known as the trickle-down economy. 42 Working with the World Bank, Branko Milanović has demonstrated that the differences between countries, and not the differences within a country, are the main culprit in global inequality. 43 Different nations redistribute capital by subsidising farms, financing health services and encouraging the trickle-down; but redistributing capital among states would require a world government. Monopoly is another issue for moral philosophy. If entrepreneurs want a moral justification, their business should not be founded on stolen property or monopoly trade. We saw that Jakob Fugger, for example, extracted untold wealth thanks to resource monopolies. Luther gave his blessings to merchants and even bankers, but threatened Fugger with hellfire. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ also left monopolies and cartels behind. Bentham cursed them as a road to slavery. But resource monopolies are still a big part of modern capitalism.

Rawls’s former student Leif Wenar draws a parallel between the oil trade and the buying up of stolen goods. 44 Almost every country in the world, says Wenar, has a constitutional norm according to which the underground resources belong to the people. Voltaire made fun of this idea: it was Pangloss who taught Candide that ‘the goods of this world are common to all men, and that everyone has an equal right to the enjoyment of them.’ In fact, more than half of global oil has been extracted by authoritarian countries which do not ask their people’s consent to this extraction. Such oil is stolen, says Wenar, and all the norms relating to the trade in stolen goods are applicable to the case. Wenar sees in the oil trade an analogy with the slave trade: that struggle was long, but the abolitionists won it. He proposes that global organisations should stop buying oil from any government that does not conform to the minimum criteria of democratic accountability to its own people. It is easy to compile a black list of these countries – what is more difficult is to imagine an international institution which could implement such a law. The power of the consumer is well tested by civil associations such as Fairtrade. But while consumer pressure brought about change in coffee and banana plantations, establishing a similar control over petrostates has yet to be achieved. The difference comes from the way in which the outputs of different farms are mixed in the final product: an addicted consumer can easily reject a particular brand in favour of another one, but if all brands are mixed up he has to reject the commodity as a whole. This is the difference between branded commodities, such as fruits, tobacco and coffee, and sorted commodities, such as sugar, cotton and oil. Decisive for the former, the power of the consumer does not spread to the latter.