Just Deserts

I just viewed a Bloggingheads video, which featured Will Wilkinson, of the Cato Institute, and Lew Daly, scholar at Demos, and author of the book, "Unjust Deserts." Daly asserts that, because, capitalism's winners' can attribute much of their success to the intellectual contributions of past innovators, the wealthy Johnny-come-latelies owe some sort of "royalties," to the rest of society.

Robert Nozick once made a similar, "Hey, Those rich guys weren't all that back then," argument, but only to armchair-psychoanalyze the jealousies of the anti-free market intellectual class. He believed their views stem from the sudden weaning of these approval-junky scholars from their teachers' sweet, selective praise:

"Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them?"

I'm having technical issues using the bloggingheads site (image only appears in the corner), so I will embed my next queued video over here: