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From a column by Jabba the Economist in the Miami Herald:

Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer and the other millionaires and billionaires of Microsoft are brilliant, hardworking, entrepreneurial and justly wealthy. But only the first 5 percent of their wealth can be justified as an economic incentive to encourage entrepreneurship and enterprise. The next 95 percent would create much more happiness and opportunity if it were divided evenly among U.S. citizens or others than if they were to consume any portion of it.

So the entitlement that hard-working Americans can claim to the fruits of their labors requires being "justified" on the grounds of incentives? How about "justifying" it on the grounds of freedom? What possible argument in favor of stripping away property rights can come from Brad DeLong's opinion, or anyone else's, that some fraction of those fruits would make other people happier than it makes its creators? I am most assuredly not concerned with the happiness it gives Brad DeLong to appoint himself the arbiter of everyone else's happiness, and to imagine the thrill of the power that would come with deciding how everything should be distributed to maximize that happiness. Let DeLong create somethign of value for once in his life, and let him be in charge of distributing that.

Thanks to reader Mike Mitchell for the link.

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