Modern economics tends to shy away from issues which do not offer themselves to the kind of treatment considered appropriate, which pertain to the less neatly rational aspects of economic life and which at the same time carry an active load of socio-economic implications. The processes of the distribution and redistribution of income and the ways in which they may affect the working of the economy, the focus of this book, constitute such a topic, as yet not fully worked into the main body of economic doctrine.In many cases a powerful formative influence upon economic realities is the pressures exercised by groups, individuals, associations etc. through means fair and foul, with the purpose of increasing their distributive and redistributive share in output. By sorting such pressures out and weaving them into the fabric of established economic analysis, this book demonstrates, among other things, that rival theories claiming the economic truth (such as Keynesianism, monetarism, etc.) far from being mutually exclusive, constitute complementary building blocks in a more comprehensive scheme.This is a provocative book, argued on the level of the core of economic theory and logic, appealing to common sense, expressed in direct language, stripped of all unnecessary technicality and comprehensible to anybody with a good understanding of general economic principles