The term ‘predistribution’ draws attention to the need for policies and institutions that are designed to improve the position of the least advantaged members of society by generating a fairer distribution of opportunities and benefits from the operation of the free market system, with less reliance on redistributive tax-and-transfer mechanisms. Although the idea of progressive predistribution has only recently begun to attract the attention of politicians and commentators in the mainstream media, there is an older and more philosophically grounded predistributive (...) approach that goes back to the idea of the property-owning democracy proposed by Economist James Meade and further developed by liberal political philosopher John Rawls. In this article, I argue that neither the Meadeian/Rawlsian POD model, nor the more recent analysis of the idea of progressive predistribution, provide a clear and convincing account of the distinction between predistributive and redistributive mechanisms. I then argue that a more promising account of this distinction is provided by the idea of the socialization of economic rent through taxation of the rental value of land, and that there are good reasons to think that a shift in the burden of taxation away from production and employment and on to the rental value of land might turn out to be both more genuinely predistributive and more effectively progressive than other possible predistributive mechanisms that have recently been proposed, most notably the aggressive taxation of private inheritances as a means to broaden the distribution of privately owned capital and productive property. (shrink)

Joseph Heath argues that we should reject the idea of a ‘just wage’ because market prices are supposed to signal scarcities and thereby to promote overall efficiency, rather than reward contributions. This argument overlooks the degree to which markets are institutionally, socially, and culturally embedded. Their outcomes are hardly ever ‘pure’ market outcomes, but the result of complex interactions of economic and other factors, including various forms of power. Instead of rejecting moral intuitions about wage justice as misguided, we can (...) often understand them as pointing towards questions about the embeddedness of markets, or lack thereof. At least in some cases, changes in the framework of markets can both increase efficiency and get us closer to conventional notions of fair wages, e.g. when gender discrimination is reduced. Thus, while an abstract notion of a ‘just wage’ remains problematic, we can and should recognize that some wages are unjust. (shrink)