Lucas: Shame on the redistributionists

From: susupply (susupply_at_mindspring.com)
Date: 06/05/04 

Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:49:05 GMT

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/04-05/essay.cfm

<< Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most
seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of
distribution. In this very minute, a child is being born to an American
family and another child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family
in India. The resources of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this
new American will be on the order of 15 times the resources available to his
Indian brother. This seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct
corrective action, and perhaps some actions of this kind can and should be
taken. But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of
people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution
to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution
of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of
poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is
nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing
production.>>

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