A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Incentive slices for a bigger cake?,” The Australian Financial Review, May 8, 1970, p. 3. Economics Made Easy (Adelaide: Brolga Books, 1982), pp. 138-40, as “Equality (1).”

Mavis is disappointed with me because I have spent too much time lately writing about rural matters. “You will never get the reputation as a statesman, dear,” she complained, “unless you write with authority about almost everything, as other newspaper correspondents do. Don’t worry too much about your facts. If you write decisively, not many people will know.” She went on to point out that other Members’ wives were beginning to sniff at her because her husband had got the reputation as “a hick from wayback” and she didn’t like it.

I took this complaint to Eccles who said it was hard enough to get me to write sensibly on things about which I knew a little, and he would hate to have to guide my pen when I wrote of other matters about which (to quote him) “your ignorance is quite startling.” But I told him we would have to have a go, and that I wanted to write about “Equality” this week.

I remember that, when I was young, I was very keen for everyone to be equal. At that stage of life, when you are shiny-eyed and idealistic, it all seems so simple. You see obvious inequalities all around you and you feel that your more cynical elders could have done something about correcting these inequalities if they had sufficient determination and altruism.

I was surprised to find that even Eccles felt like that when he was young. I was a bit startled to find that he had ever been young. I had always imagined that he was born a dried up economist and I find it difficult to imagine him as a child, playing with toys and gurgling happily. But he admits that he was quite human once.

Even now, I find myself attracted to this ideal of equality. And as my popularity has waned since Eccles started on his whining way, I thought I would give the equality trumpet a really good toot.

But the trouble is, my heart isn’t really in it. It’s not because equality isn’t a good thing, it is. But I was very disappointed to find that, even before I became a Member of Parliament, if the government started to take away by taxation a lot of money I made in order to make other people more equal with me, then I stopped working extra hard and extra long hours. And because there are a lot of people with my rather miserable outlook on life who think as I do, then the total economic cake becomes smaller just because a lot of us stop working hard and stop taking risks.

It is true that the economic cake may be cut into more equal slices by increasing taxation, and if that is the object of the exercise, then the equality advocates are right. But if the object is to have an economic cake as big as possible with everyone getting a reasonable slice of it, then we have to be careful not to destroy the incentive to work hard as well. I think the present rate of income tax is dangerously close to this level now.

I am disappointed to find my unfortunate attitude to life is such a barrier to progress, but I am not surprised. I remember (with shame) how, during the wool boom when income tax hit me fairly between the eyes for the first time, I spent far more time thinking about avoiding (that’s the right word) taxation than I did in working hard to make more money only to have it taken away from me.

So until my attitude to life changes and until human nature changes, we have to choose between a smaller economic cake cut up into equal slices and a larger economic cake cut up into somewhat unequal slices. There is nothing much that can be done about it, unless we are to suddenly start becoming better people. And really, there’s not much sign of this, not in me, anyway!