Overall, Forbes magazine names for 2007 some 1125 billionaires, more than ever before. Together, they own the proud total of 4,4 trillion dollars, up $900 billion from last year. And according to UN figures, there are about 850 million people going hungry. A distribution problem? Pro­fit greed and maximizing profits instead of appropriate profits for the owners of the means of production? Just what is appropriate? Half, a third, or a fifth?

Those who criticize this as potential profit greed or maximizing profits do not know either what constitutes a respectable profit. On the one hand, the criterion of private enrichment as a controlling principle of business is accepted, but its ugly consequence – the rich getting richer and richer and the poor getting poorer and poorer – should not ensue. Everyone is initially enthusiastic about organizing the economy as a market economy, that is via the private ownership of the means of production and private enrichment because this is so efficient, but then some find this unfair. The question of how much production capacity is needed for the means of subsistence, for example, should not be decided based on the needs of the starving people, but based on efficient private accumulation of money. All proponents of the market economy system agree on this. In view of the inevitable consequences of money driven efficiency – why should a commodities producer produce food for people who, for whatever reason, cannot pay for them – the criterion of social justice which is foreign to the economic principles of commodities production should correct the ugly excesses of the efficient increase of money. Now we have a contradiction. On the one hand, things should be efficient in the private economy, on the other hand, socially just. What does social justice mean? Those who are unsuccessful in the market economy competition for business and jobs do not have any right to participate in the wealth of the society, correctly, according to the rules of the market economy. How much the unsuccessful are to be given in welfare measures is an open issue, which everyone may find fair or unfair according to his private interests. Since the successful representatives of the liberal market economy and their “critics” – the supporters of a social market economy – agree on the decisive issue – the only feasible system is the market economy – the distribution issue is consequently decided according to market economy criteria. How much correction can profitable business stand? Very little!

Global hunger, one billion people with no access to clean water, slums, street children, old-age poverty, unemployment, and homelessness even in the richest industrial countries in the 21st century thus do not, despite all technological advances, contradict the ongoing debate on the fairness of distribution and the necessary or reasonable scope of the social market economy. Rather they are the consequence of agreement with respect to the economic system.

It is not about more or less – which criterion should be used for setting the limits – but about a production system in which the goal is not supplying the population, but earning money. Redistribution does not change the fact that the increase of money, the profit, is the criterion for production and thus decides what, if, and for whom and under what working conditions things are produced. The fact that in the market economy the rich get richer and the poor get poorer has a compelling economic reason and can thus not be prevented as long as economies are organized as a market economy. Why is that?