THE CITY
requires certain preconditions in order to best function, most espe‐ cially a strong civic and social order and a shared belief in an under‐ lying moral code.” In other words, the mediating institutions of soci‐ ety—families, churches, schools, voluntary associations—need to produce what the market and the state can’t—decent people—but without which neither can survive. Wehner and Brooks conclude the book by asking, “Is capitalism unjust?” They claim that starting in the 1970s, academics in America “broke with previous political philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers in arguing that the fundamental task of the state is to end inequality.” And they claim that “the core of this belief is that inequality is intrinsically bad and even intolera‐ ble” and that government should do something about it. Their re‐ sponse is odd: “First, we note that jettisoning capitalism will not lead to greater equality.” But who is suggesting we jettison capitalism? Still, they go on for several pages recounting, again, the ills of com‐ munism, and then move on to ask a string of rhetorical questions about how far liberals want us to go in addressing inequality: What would proper redistribution of income look like? Should everyone have the same income, regardless of one’s occupation and station in life? … Should their income be set by the federal government? If not, should income equality be achieved by taxing at such a prohibitive rate that the gap between LeBron James and the hotdog vender is largely eliminated? And, if so, what would be the negative impact on the performance and output of people who now earn huge salaries? In short, what lengths are the new egalitarians willing to go in order to eliminate or reduce the gap? And at what cost? They answer none of these questions, cite no egalitarian scholars who support such a worldview, and entertain no alternative concep‐ tions of social justice. Instead, they do their best to explain away many worries one might have about economic inequality and to ar‐ gue that government measures to fix them would be worse than the problem itself. They conclude: “Efforts to achieve level income have failed everywhere they have occurred because such efforts cut against the human grain. Yet even if it were achievable, we would still reject it on moral and philosophical grounds.” On their view, “forced egalitarianism is itself unjust.” They cite select Biblical verses and church teachers to conclude that redistribution of wealth, “if it is 76