Steve Den Beste had an interesting throwaway comment today. He said: "If you want a bigger pie you have to accept that it will be divided unevenly, because that is the incentive for making the pie bigger." This reminded me of something I've wanted to write about for some time: David Chandler's L-Curve site.

(For those who care, this appears to be neither David Chandler the liquid theorist nor David Chandler the physical chemist, nor David Chandler the management consultant.)

The implication of the "L-Curve" is that in the U.S., income is highly unequally distributed, and wealth even more so. Mr. Chandler uses a stark depiction of these facts to ask questions such as: "Can democracy meaningfully exist where the distribution of wealth, and thus the distribution of power, is this concentrated?"

But several questions are begged here. First is the obvious assumption that wealth and power are equivalent. I don't deny that there's some correlation between wealth and power, but I doubt it's linear. Even minimally wealthy people have basic civil rights, and extremely wealthy people are occasionally convicted of crimes and sent to prison (ask Michael Milken). Certainly there is value in being wealthy if you are going to be a criminal defendant (ask O.J. Simpson or John Walker Lindh), but even Mr. Chandler doesn't seem to argue that we've become a lawless society where the wealthy trample the poor.

A more interesting point is that Mr. Chandler doesn't provide the statistics on income distribution in any other nation. I doubt you'd see anything different anywhere in the world: in the capitalist "West" (say Germany, Japan, the U.K.), in South America or Africa, or in the few remaining allegedly Communist nations -- notably China. Perhaps in China you'd have to account for non-monetary perks specially, but I expect that you'd still find that there's a wealthy/privileged class and a mass class, which is the fundamental point ofthe article.

Even more interesting -- and much more disturbing -- is that Mr. Chandler seems to be seekinga a cure for the L-curve. "A truly democratic society needs to find ways to manage the economy to benefit the population as a whole. This is not being done." A truly democratic society can decide to take your popsicle away and split it into equal shares. This is not being done because we have property rights, a concept from English common law which Mr. Chandler may not be familiar with. I wonder how the inequity he describes could be cured without undermining one of the fundamental freedoms -- the right to property -- described in our founding documents. (In particular, the 5th Amendment states "No person .. shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....")

Even if the government were to seriously attempt to remedy this inequity, and the Constitutional problems could somehow be overcome, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to try. This is for the reason den Beste gives in the quote above: the only reason that there's a lot of wealth distributed unequally is that it's not possible to have a lot of wealth distributed equally. It's possible to have a little wealth distributed equally, but once you get past the point of bare survival, extra production will only happen with appropriate incentives. And the only incentive that appears to work is private property, i.e, "allowing" the producer to keep most of the fruits of his labor.