Free to choose (as someone once said).(income distribution)

EVERY time I hear someone argue that the distribution of income is unjust and must be remedied by high taxes on the rich, I think back to a time when I was recruiting economists for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

About ten years ago, we made an offer to a hot young economist. We proposed an extremely healthy salary, about 50 percent higher than his next-best offer, a teaching position at a small college. The two jobs offered very different lifestyles. At the Fed, he would work hard and have only a few weeks of vacation each year, but he would be at the front line of American economic policymaking. At the small college, he would teach a few classes and have plenty of free time, but be far from the action.

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After much agonizing, the nice fellow decided to be a professor. The freedom of academe, he argued, was too attractive to pass up.

Given the vagaries of the tax tables at the time, the Federal Reserve salary would have put him in the top bracket. The small-college salary put him near the bottom. He had simply decided to work less for a smaller income. A bit later, someone else took the Fed job he had refused. These two economists now had salaries at opposite ends of the spectrum. But would it have been fair to take money from the much harder-working Federal Reserve economist and give it to his tennis-playing peer?

Poverty and need undoubtedly still exist in the ...