Egalitarian Strategies

We on the left are in search of a new model for egalitarian society, after the definitive failure of what was called communism, and the evident victory, on an international scale, of capitalism. In my view, however, labeling that search as one for a “third way” or a “fourth way” is misguided. There are a finite number of strategies that we know, and none of them has been exhausted. Or perhaps I should say, it is a popular but false inference that the failure of communism implies the exhaustion of all egalitarian prospects. That is far from the truth.

To begin, I must state two ground rules for thinking about this question. First, any complex society must use markets. Markets decentralize the allocation of resources and com...