Aristotle argues further that equalization of property would be powerless to prevent anything more than the merely petty crimes, for the grossest ones are the result of inordinate desire, rather than of inability to provide life’s necessities.803 Moreover, there are many other natural inequalities of life what would remain to arouse discontent.804 This is a sensible observation that has often been overlooked by modern radical socialists, though its author might have objected further that such personal diversities would also render an abiding equality of property impossible. His previous argument, however, that immorality and crimes are the result of inordinate desire, rather than of economic need, might be answered today by the results of investigations upon the relation of wages to morality.
The doctrine of communistic equality, as preached by some theorists in fifth- and fourth-century Greece, and as satirized by Aristophanes,805 had no appeal for Aristotle. It was, to him, merely a thinly veiled individualism. He saw through the selfish partisanship of both oligarchs and democrats, and recognized that all men are poor judges in matters that concern themselves.806 The excessive individualism of the radical democrat of his day, which permitted the majority to confiscate the property of the minority in the name of a false equality, was as hateful to him as it was to Plato.807 As seen above, he insisted that economic or