The aff is back-end redistribution, which obscures how capitalism uses the law to code the production of wealth inequality in at the front-end.

KATHARINA PISTOR: The real distinction is between whether we are talking about redistribution at the back end or the creation of wealth at the front end. And I’m interested in the front end. I want to show first how wealth is being created, and then also think about whether the typical policy advice, like taxation, is actually an effective tool to deal with the wealth creation at the front end.

So economists, because they believe that ultimately it’s the markets and better skills and better know-how and better resource management is what produces wealth, they are less concerned with predistribution.

And I’m basically saying the creation of wealth itself is already a process by which some harness the legal system, which is actually not a private good but a social resource, to produce their private wealth. So what they creating already has basically the D.N.A. of a social structure built into that. And I really like to think about the coding of capital as the code being something akin to the D.N.A., the genetic code, or akin to a software code. That’s really how the stuff is made.

The law is the source from which capital is cut. If you understand this, then you have to say, OK, at the back end, we want to do some redistribution. I’m all for redistribution also, especially given the amount of inequality we have today.

But unless we think about the creation of wealth and how inequality is being created — through law, in my argument — we will never get ahead of the game. We might do some redistribution now, as we’ve done in the golden age of the 1960s, ’70s, when the state actually did tax. And then taxation will be pushed back again, and inequality will come back.

And we haven’t still figured out how to really deal with the inequality at the front end. So I’m basically saying, let’s just start looking at how wealth is created, and then we can decide what policy tools do we want to use to minimize inequality or at least keep some check on it and whether redistribution is the best means to achieve that.