Economic Justice in the New Millennium.

• Author: Rinehart, Larry

Direct Redistribution of Wealth: Regulation of Income and Property. In August 1995, the program of the Greens/Green Party USA was amended to include a guaranteed minimum income, and a maximum wage of 10 times the minimum wage; the intent being that the income of the richest not exceed that of the poorest by more than a factor of 10. In January 2000, Joel Kovel in his presidential platform for the California primary, proposed a maximum/minimum income ratio of only 4:1, and added a cap of $2 million on personal assets, to be maintained by confiscatory taxes. In a time when the upward removal of wealth, from the Lower to the highest stratum of the capitalist pyramid, has been rampant for two full decades, no one need be surprised that such direct modes of address to this crisis are being proposed.

The Perspective of Liberty. But how do such proposals square with liberty? What about the unalienable rights of the rich? How shall we justify such a program to those who believe their pursuit of happiness will be tyrannically restricted on a mere $2 million, or $10 million, or $50 million? Liberty is a social and ultimately political form of freedom, in which the rights of each individual exist in tenuous balance with the rights of all others. In order for liberty to survive in a society, there needs to be a broad consensus or concord among the members of that society, a concord more of feeling than of ideology, that the affirmation of one's own rights involves the acceptance of the rights of all others, and that the latter in turn may involve, certain voluntary self-limitations, all very much in accord with the spirit of liberty.

A Millennial Consensus? And when in the course of events the members of a society declare themselves citizens of a democratic republic, they may form a consensual majority to assure that children need not go hungry or uneducated, while a few grow rich; that the very poorest need not perish while a few build vast fortunes; and that a just function of their government shall be the regulation of income and assets to these ends. The historical formation of such a consensual majority in these states, during the first decade of the new millennium, is the task for a rhetoric of persuasion still to be invented; but the Green campaign 2000 can be an important arena for displaying this idea to the minds of the electorate: That a sovereign people, acting through the instrument of their government, may justly limit the acquisition of...