In his recent work, Robin Hahnel defends a monolithic metric of economic desert: to each according to effort or sacrifice. I criticize from an egalitarian standpoint this meritocratic distributive principle on theoretical, practical, and normative grounds. I also question his argument that in market socialism the allocation of labor cannot accommodate an egalitarian distribution of labor income; his not unfamiliar argument rests on a fatal theoretical error that conflates the allocative and distributive functions of market prices. I treat Hahnel’s work in the context of larger issues about competing concepts of justice and the distributive institutions that might suit them.
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