Many decisions which involve status ascription might be regarded from some other points of view as ordinary social decisions involving efficiency or other such mundane considerations. However, what is striking about recent times is precisely the growth of an ideological passion which regards particular decisions and decision making processes as symbolic of status rather than simply instruments of social expediency. One of the more extreme examples of this was the insistence of French-Canadian authorities in Canada’s Quebec Province that airline pilots landing at their airports converse with the control towers only in French. Even though hundreds of lives are at stake in conversations between pilots and control towers, this social expediency consideration was subordinated to status ascription issues involved — the general controversy over the preeminence of French language and culture in Quebec. Only a concerted refusal of international airline pilots to fly into Quebec forced the government to reconsider this policy. In the United States, various groups have regarded various laws and policies (private and public) as involving the status of its members — their ultimate value as human beings — rather than simply questions about the best way to get a given job done or the social expediency of particular processes. Even where there are demonstrable
The link between status ascription and political power is apparent in the “redistribution” of income and other economic benefits. While growing governmental control over the output generated by private activity is often described by its hoped for result as “income redistribution,” statistical data show that the actual “redistribution” of money and power from the public to the government vastly exceeds any “redistribution” from one income class to another. The percentage of the aggregate American income earned by the top fifth, bottom fifth, etc., has remained almost unchanged for decades82 while governmental powers and welfare state expenditures have expanded tremendously. There has been “less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”83 International comparisons show the same result as intertemporal comparisons: “In all the Western nations — the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany — despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution “of income is strikingly similar.”84 What the national differences in “welfare state” policies actually affect is the distribution of money and power between the public and the government.