Distribution of Wealth: is not always bad

There are two things to be distributed among people: a radio manufacturing plant and land (agriculture).

Lets first talk about the radio factory. It will be foolish to break the radio factory into pieces and give each equal amount of scrap metal. And if the factory is given to the workers only then the concept of equality is not satisfied (I mean not everybody is getting share). So there is only one possible option left with us, i.e., to give the ownership of the factory to a democratic authority which will be responsible to distribute the profit among all(generated by the radio factory).

Here comes the real problem. How will the workers or the authority be interested to run the factory, if, by taking no interest, they are not going to lose their share? neither they are getting any extra share by taking interest (because the final objective of the society is to guarantee equality).

In simple words, distribution of a radio factory is not going to help the society as a whole.

Now consider the case of land. If land is distributed equally (assuming that land everywhere is equally productive) everybody would be owner of equal amount of land. here the land is different from radio factory in the sense that the individual owners are able to use it to produce (grains and vegetables). Since everybody gets benefit from keeping the production level high thus overall production is not going to decrease (though I am not claiming here that the gross production will increase).

What is the difference we saw in between two cases above? The first one (the radio factory) needs a central authority but the second one needs no such authority.

There are many examples of successful land distribution programs. In Denmark, common people were greatly benefited from cooperative farming (link). In West Bengal, India land reform program in early 80s considerably reduced rural poverty (link).