Setting aside the shock to the urban economy that any of these proposals would have inflicted, it is the assumptions on which the arguments rested that are worthy of note. The RNS started from the premiss that all forms of labour were equal in worth and that one would, therefore, expect to see an equal distribution of per capita incomes across the economy. This assumption is alien to any kind of conventional economic reasoning, which assumes that relative incomes ultimately reflect productive contribution as valued at prices determined by supply and demand. From this point of view the
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