edit: I'm new to the concept of pareto efficiency, so hopefully this reads more as a sincere question rather than a challenge to your opinion
Imagine a situation with two people and a state-like actor.
One person has all of the food in the entire world minus one loaf of bread. The other person has one loaf of bread. After they eat that loaf, they will probably die of starvation in the next 30 days.
This is a Pareto efficient distribution.
If the state-like actor intervened and re-distributed some of the food to the other person (with coercion), I would argue that aggregate welfare would be improved.
Your point makes sense to me now though, so thanks
Doesn't really play out that way in actual real life (people still starve every day and both you and i probably have the resources to stop at least one of those starvation deaths), so didn't think of including this altruism in my toy model
It's not a straw-man description of Pareto efficiency, it's a toy example designed to answer a very explicit question by the GP. What I described was a Pareto efficient distribution, and not the most welfare enhancing one.
What if neither person can make bread and the other just happened to inherit it all from their parents? Who is burdening who?
And that's before we get into the real-world ethics of whether we can honestly claim that contemporary wealth distributions are really derived from consensual interaction. Why should the descendents of nobility be entitled to wealth deriving from what are effectively violent takings?
I don't know - the whole deontological libertarian project in this sense seems like it has gaping holes.
None. However, part of the role of government (I would likely say it's entire role) is to make society as a whole better. It does this by imposing rules (obligations) on members of that society (taxes, a force to enforce the concept of private property, etc).
In the toy case described above, it is likely to the benefit of society to have both members survive and one member be unhappy; rather than have one member survive, but be happier. Hence, the government enforces an obligation on the first person to share their food.
Pareto efficiency is defined to be an economic state where resources cannot be reallocated to make one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off. If a redistribution can make things better, it is not an efficient state.
Okay, with work, let's say they are given the bare minimum to survive and they will get their work done (no rational reason to offer a higher wage). It would still be welfare enhancing to re-distribute.
> If a redistribution can make things better, it is not an efficient state.
This is just straight-up false, no other comment. Not what Pareto efficiency. The redistribution makes the person taken from worse off.
Again, that is the definition of pareto efficiency.
With only two people, the most efficient thing to do is to trade it for the bare minimum the other person needs to survive. Beyond that is not Pareto efficient.
So long as you have surplus, and that surplus has value, it makes sense to trade it, rather than have it sit idle.
It does not become Pareto efficient until person A is worse off by trading bread, by which point they no longer have enough to completely satisfy their needs.