Supply‐side politics: Circumventing the claims of justice
Abstract As Hume says, questions of distributive justice only arise under conditions of moderate scarcity. That in turn suggests that increasing (or proposing or promising or pretending to increase) the supply of goods may be an effective way of circumventing claims of justice. Politicians have not been blind to these possibilities. Attempts at supply‐side solutions to distributional problems are very common indeed across a wide range of policy areas. Having demonstrated that I shall then critique such solutions, showing all the fallacies that may embody. My conclusion is that, while increasing supply might sometimes be an acceptable method of resolving distributional problems, there is a variety of arguably common circumstances in which such strategies are wildly inappropriate.