sented the great theory of the Invisible Hand it was generally believed that the forces of private greed and selfishness lead to social beneficence and that the uncompromising quest for profits results to serve public interest and in the best possible allocation of resources. The lack of any central direction was not thought to be a sufficient factor in dissuading the concept of free markets. This provided the wealthy with the moral and ethical justification for exploiting and accumulating huge quantities of wealth for themselves, without even thinking of the poor. Thus, there was no conflict between rich people's utility, their use of resources and the impact that this would have, or lack thereof, upon those members of society who were in most need o!
             f economic expansiveness. With the emergence of ideas such as externalities and the spill over effects, that are not reflected in the pricing mechanisms, a conflict between utility and public welfare finally arose. The conceptualisation of these thoughts, externalities and spill- over effects, resulted in the need to bring a balancing factor in attempting to stabilize the knock-on effects upon utility and public welfare. Thus, there was a change in the basic assumptions of the allocation theory and it was desired that government policies should try to accomplish both a Pareto optimal and an equitable distributional outcome.
             One cannot solely blame Adam Smith's idea of selfishness and greed as being responsible for the increase in the income inequality levels of countries, infact many economists today believe that the main cause for this rise in income inequality between countries is because the rich countries have a much superior technology level than the poor countries. This superior technology makes it possible for rich countries to raise their profit rates to levels much higher than those attainable in poor countries. Although, traditional economic theory would lead us ...