ABSTRACT
This chapter is not to argue for 80 per cent top rate tax, but, modestly, to question why it cannot be thought and to help render it thinkable, by refocusing the terms of the debate in distributive justice from the merits of the relative equality and inequality of winners and losers in capitalism to the common ground of civil order and social rights, which conservatives traditionally sought to preserve with cautious adaptation and gradual reform. Thatcher and Reagan's conservative leap forward revolutionised public attitudes by raising the prominence of capitalist market economics not just as a tool of distributive justice but as the primary procedural device to provide it. To stimulate economic growth, civil bureaucracies and labour unions were dismantled, finance and commerce deregulated and public services privatised. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, radical conservative politicians established the proposal that liberalisation of the economy was needed to revive flagging Western economies.
