The Borders of Sharing

The homogenization of wealth and resources, the Christian sharing of production, will always be with us. It has countless slogans, faces and accents and, with the exception of the communists, is usually a national phenomenon. The poorer of the nation plan for the wealth of the richer of the nation.

It should not be too difficult a sell. After all, why should someone have more than another--and, if the argument is that the rich worked harder or achieved more--why is that the deciding factor? Where does work sit on the sliding scale of value when compared to the life or comfort of another human being?

It's in its logical conclusion that sharing gets sticky. Most proponents see the struggle within their own culture; the redistribution is a more gentle one. In the West, everyone will have shelter, food--some perhaps a car. But in its international application, redistribution gets more difficult. Merging the incomes of New York and Mississippi is one thing, merging Mississippi with Uganda is quite something else. The struggles within the EU, really between the productive north and the unproductive south, are over this exact question. The German worker does not want to support the Greek retiree.

So does this egalitarianism have boundaries? And if it does, how are those boundaries drawn?