A response to a critic

" Let's say I'm a smart, talented, able-bodied skilled worker. I have more talents and am more capable of useful production than the average slob.

I live in a socialist system. The state/society takes whatever I produce and redistributes it to everyone else. I, in turn, recieve some division of the aggregate product of everyone else's labor.

If I work hard, I get the same amount as if I don't work very hard (or, depending on how much is being socialized, if I don't even work at all).

What incentive do I have to work?
"


There is another way to go about responding to your question, and since I alluded to it in another post I thought I could explain it in more detail:

A prominent factual defense of inequality traces it to a supposedly ineradicable human selfishness. The defense says that inequality is ensured by something as original to human nature as sin is, on the Christian view of original sin: people are by nature selfish, whether or not that is, like being a sinner, a bad thing to be and inequality is an unavoidable result of that selfishness whether or not inequality is unjust.

Being "selfish", here, means desiring things for oneself, and for those in one's immediate circle (e.g. family), and being disposed to act on that desire, even when the consequence is that one has (much) more than other people do, and could otherwise have had.

The selfishness defense of inequality has two premises. First, a human-nature premise: that people are by nature selfish. And second, a sociological premise, that if people are selfish then equality is impossible to achieve and our sustain.

My rejection of the human nature premise goes something like this, as it does for many socialists: social structures extensively shape the structure of motivation. There exists no underlying human nature which can be straightforwardly unselfish or selfish, or selfish in some fixed degree. I do not agree with those who respond to this premise by claiming there is no such thing as human nature: that is an unmatieralist position, but we are animals, with a particular biology and a psychology induced by it. But human nature is quite plastic with respect to motivation. It is true, in my view, that circumstances will have to propitious to a certain degree for humans to be unselfish in their attitude and behavior. It may be best to explain this by saying that the truth about human nature, in my view, can disclosed by the variable height of a line on a grap with circumstances on the horizontal and degrees of manfiested selfish orientation on the vertical. The right way to categorize human nature would be as a function, with circumstances as arguments and forms of behavior as values. And all you need to believe, in order to deny that human nature is selfish in a sense that it threatens the egalitarian project, is what I believe: that people would be relevantly unselfish in propitious circumstances, and such circumstances are acessible.

Some reject the sociological premise independently, I reject it in principle but I personally doubt we have reached the technological level to implement the independent solution to it in an acceptable way but I will state the common reply to this premise here due to its importance, in both the past and the future, in this debate:
It does not follow from the fact that if people are by nature selfish that inequality is inescapable. The social structure is soveriegn over not just motivation, but so, too, structure is soveriegn over the upshot of motivation. Even if people are selfish, the rules governing their interaction could nevertheless prevent their selfishness from issuing in inequality. Such rules might, for example, be enforced by a great mjaority, who were themselves selfishly or at least not altruistically motivated, and who would be at the short end of inequality in the abscensce of such rules.