Pareto "started his career [as] a fiery advocate of classical liberalism, besetting the most ardent British liberals with his attacks on any form of government intervention in the free market...
"Pareto maintained cordial personal relationships with individual socialists, but he always thought their economic ideas were severely flawed. He later became suspicious of their motives and denounced socialist leaders as an 'aristocracy of brigands' who threatened to despoil the country and criticized the government of Giovanni Giolitti for not taking a tougher stance against worker strikes. Growing unrest among labor in Italy led him to the anti-socialist and anti-democratic camp. His attitude toward fascism in his last years is a matter of controversy...
'Pareto had argued that democracy was an illusion and that a ruling class always emerged and enriched itself. For him, the key question was how actively the rulers ruled. For this reason, he called for a drastic reduction of the state and welcomed Benito Mussolini's rule as a transition to this minimal state so as to liberate the "pure" economic forces.'
"Under the assumptions of the first welfare theorem, a competitive market leads to a Pareto-efficient outcome. This result was first demonstrated mathematically by economists Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu."
Again, it's a matter only of insinuation, given the neoclassicals' efforts to seem more scientific and neutral than they were. Pareto "optimality" is a kind of efficiency that ignores the downside of economic inequality. A plutocracy in which the top one percent of people have 80 percent of the wealth could be Pareto efficient if there's no waste and you could increase the wealth of the bottom 99 percent only by taking some wealth from the top one percent (making them worse off). But that kind of optimality or efficiency would be quite illusory because such a society could be expected, on non-economic, sociological grounds, to end in a bloody revolution in which the bottom 99 would kill the elites and take all their stuff.
What the scientistic neoclassicals did was obfuscate this commonsense fact by making their "models" of capitalism seem like scientific discoveries. They narrowed the focus, for instance, to Pareto's stilted kind of efficiency, leaving out the more important social factors, such as the fact that the modern majority won't stand for being ruled unfairly by a pack of thieving, complacent power elites.
