Distributive Justice According to Stiglitz, Chomsky, and Marx

Distributive Justice According to Stiglitz, Chomsky, and Marx

The last paper in this series gave voice to three libertarian thinkers and their views on distributive justice. This paper moves away from free market thinkers to focus on proposals from the left. What follows is an argument analysis of three influential arguments from liberal thinkers, each with a unique perspective on the corrective measures required to achieve distributional justice. The authors examined include Joseph Stiglitz, Noam Chomsky, and Karl Marx. For clarity, and to save space, these arguments have been simplified. Yet, they remain largely true to the originals. In the end, I argue that Joseph Stiglitz provides us with the most believable framework for effecting a more just economic distribution.

Stiglitz and the Imperative of Inequality

The first corrective I discuss is Stiglitz's thesis on inequality. His book, The Price of Inequality, touches upon a broad spectrum of economic and moral issues related to distributional justice. Here, my focus is on his argument for regulations that redistribute wealth from the richest individuals to the rest of society. First, Stiglitz posits that extreme inequality locks the poorest consumers into a life of poverty, which is fundamentally unjust. Next, he asserts that government policies determine whether or not extreme inequality exists. Having established these premises, Stiglitz argues that whereas government actions determine the state of inequality, and extreme inequality leads to gross injustice, government ought to enact policies to curb such inequality.

Let’s unpack Stiglitz’s argument. To understand his first premise, it is important to explain his stance on inequality. His criticism of inequality is not a call for a uniform distribution of wealth. He is much more concerned with the extreme disparities in wealth and economic opportunity. For example, that the richest five percent of Americans control sixty percent of wealth, while the...