The Social Justice Syllabus Project

Economists on Social Justice

Published Oct 24, 2013  printer-friendly

Economists on Social Justice

          Jeff Milyo: “It’s my honor to be guest blogging this week.  I’ll be discussing the topic of grassroots lobbying and some of the findings from my related research.  However, I’m not a lawyer, just a social scientist, so please temper your expectations accordingly (since we all know that when used as a modifier, ‘social’ means ‘not’; e.g., social justice, social security, social worker, etc.)” (“Tocqueville Meets the Speech Police,” June 21, 2010, http://volokh.com/2010/06/21/tocqueville-meets-the-speech-police/, accessed Dec. 10, 2011).

 

          Edgar Browning: “What is striking about preferential admissions policies is the strong likelihood that they harm much of the very group they are intended to help. Yet egalitarians continue to support this policy since it promotes social justice in their view” (Stealing From Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, 2008, p. 39).

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          “In the end, everyone is stealing from everyone else, and it’s not clear who really benefits from the smaller economic pie. It is not surprising that we get crisscrossing and offsetting transfer policies that are riddled with iniquities and inefficiencies. It’s just what you expect from the political process when it embarks on the pursuit for social justice where people have necessarily conflicting interests” (Stealing From Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, 2008, p. 183).

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          “As the discussion throughout this chapter suggests, there are many reasons why we should be skeptical of egalitarians’ claims that the welfare state promotes social justice, or even the well-being of the poor themselves” (Stealing From Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, 2008, p. 185).

         

          Walter Block: “In my previous columns on language, I suggested that our friends from the left have hijacked vast verbal territory, and used it against us. That is, they have taken words such as ‘profiteer,’ ‘rent seeking,’ [‘social justice’, ‘rights,’] etc., and used them as sticks with which to beat us and undermine our political economic perspective.

          I urged that we strive mightily to safeguard our own vocabulary. I did so on the ground that we are in a battle of ideas with them, and if there are certain words we are precluded from using, or can only use in a certain way, ‘their’ way, victory will be just that much more difficult.

          Let us now consider a few more words which we may have, even unknowingly, incorporated into our language, much to the detriment of promoting the free and prosperous society.

Social Justice

          We all know what ‘they’ mean by ‘social justice.’ This is not just justice as applied to social issues, but in addition, or instead, a particular world view with regard to them. For example, in popular parlance, to take the ‘social justice’ point of view now implies in debates over egalitarianism that one advocate the coercive transfer of funds from rich to poor, in total disregard of the property rights of the former.

          In the environmental area, the advocate of ‘social justice’ must of necessity support all sorts of socialist, interventionistic, and regulatory schemes having to do with water, global warming, forests, species extinction, plastics, etc. The free enterprise environmentalist vision, where markets and private property are seen as the solution to environmental problems, not their cause, is strictly ruled out of ‘social justice’ court.

          There are two possible responses to this linguistic development. We can blithely stand by, accept this usage, and adamantly maintain that we oppose ‘social justice.’ Or, we can take the stance that we, too, support ‘social justice,’ only have a rather different perspective on that issue. I support the latter course of action. It doesn’t sound too good to the ear to be on record as opposing justice, any kind of justice” (“Social Justice, Rights, and Isolationism,” May 30, 2000, http://mises.org/daily/435/Social-Justice-Rights-and-Isolationism, accessed Oct 24, 2013).

         

          Walter Williams: “Hayek’s answer is that the road to Hitler’s National Socialism (Nazism) was paved over a 70-year period by German thinkers and activists who, in pursuit of ‘social justice,’ were calling for abandonment of individualism, private property rights, and limited government. Distinguished German scholars like Hegel, List, Schmoller, Plenge, and Lensch provided the intellectual basis for Hitler’s Nazism”(“Warnings from Hayek On the Road to Serfdom,” Atlanta Daily World, March 31, 1988, ProQuest Historical Newspapers).

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          “The pursuit of social justice probably accounts for most human misery. . . In pursuit of social justice, personal liberty has become a secondary or tertiary matter” (The Freeman, “Social Justice, July 1998, vol. 48(7) available at: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/social-justice-2/).

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          “Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for ‘social justice.’ It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over” (“Elites and Tyrants: The Fruits of Social Justice,” Capitalism Magazine Oct. 7, 2009, http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/history/5658-elites-and-tyrants-the-fruits-of-social-justice.html, accessed Dec. 5, 2011).

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          “Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation's elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement ‘social justice.’ Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century's notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn't over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings” (“Elites and Tyrants: The Fruits of Social Justice,” Capitalism Magazine Oct. 7, 2009, http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/history/5658-elites-and-tyrants-the-fruits-of-social-justice.html, accessed Dec. 5, 2011).

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          “Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement for social justice -- to right historical wrongs. The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about these injustices?” (“Racial Diversity at the Expense of Intellectual Diversity,” Capitalism Magazine, Nov. 24, 2006, http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/racism/4842-racial-diversity-at-the-expense-of-intellectual-diversity.html, Dec. 4, 2011).

 

          Thomas Sowell: “It has long been recognized that those on the political left are more articulate than their opponents. The words they chose for the things they are for or against make it easy to decide whether to be for against those things. Are you for or against ‘social justice’? A no-brainer. Who is going to be for injustice. What about a ‘living wage’? Who wants people not to have enough money to live on” (“A War of Words,” in Dismantling America, 2010, p. 98).

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          “Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?” (“Random Thoughts,” in Dismantling America, 2010, p. 335).

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           “Sometimes what is missing in a fallacy is simply a definition. Undefined words have a special power in politics, particularly when they invoke some principle that engages people’s emotions. ‘Fair’ is one of those undefined words which have attracted political support for policies ranging from Fair Trade Laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. While the fact that the word is undefined is an intellectual handicap, it is a huge political advantage. People with very different views on substantive issues can be unified and mobilized behind a word that papers over their differing, and sometimes even mutually contradictory, ideas. Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with ‘social justice,’ ‘equality,’ and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups – all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words” (Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2008, p.1).

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          “The idea cannot be refuted because it has no specific meaning. Fighting it would be like trying to punch the fog. No wonder ‘social justice’ has been such a political success for more than a century — and counting.

          While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right — that it is unjust — that some people are so much better off than others. . .

          Some advocates of ‘social justice’ would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person's chances in life radically different from the chances that others have — through no fault of one and through no merit of the others.

          Maybe the person who wasted educational opportunities and developed self-destructive behavior would have turned out differently if born into a different home or a different community.

          That would of course be more just. But now we are no longer talking about ‘social’ justice, unless we believe that it is all society's fault that different families and communities have different values and priorities — and that society can ‘solve’ that ‘problem’” (“The Money of Fools,” Lew Rockwell, Sept. 14, 2010, http://www.lewrockwell.com/sowell/sowell20.1.html, accessed Nov. 8, 2011).

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          “The left has a whole vocabulary devoted to depicting people who do not meet standards as people who have been denied ‘access.’

          Whether it is academic standards, job qualifications or credit requirements, those who do not measure up are said to have been deprived of ‘opportunity,’ ‘rights’ or ‘social justice.

          The words games of the left -- from the mantra of ‘diversity’ to the pieties of ‘compassion’ -- are not just games. They are ways of imposing power by evading issues of substance through the use of seductive rhetoric” (“The Left’s Vocabulary,” Capitalist Magazine, Aug. 5, 2004, http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/3830-the-left-s-vocabulary.html, accessed Dec. 4, 2011).

 

          David C. Rose: “Do free market societies inevitably produce unjust outcomes, or are social justice theorists incorrectly inferring injustice from what is actually innocuous inequality? In my view the latter is true and the former is false, so social justice theory amounts to a solution in search of a problem. As such, it constitutes a massive straw man argument against the free market society. Making matters worse, it is a particularly attractive straw man argument because it comports well with incorrect but very plausible folk wisdom about what a market economic system is and how it functions. An affirmative defense of this claim is beyond the scope of this essay, but it will become clear below that an affirmative defense of this claim is not required to reject social justice theory. 

          What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both misguided and dangerous. It is misguided because it regards observed inequality as prima facie evidence of injustice because of insufficient understanding of how a free market economy actually works. It is dangerous because social justice advocates therefore attempt to solve a moral problem that doesn’t exist and, in so doing, reduce a society’s ability to solve moral problems that really do exist. In making my arguments I’ll discuss the origins of social justice thinking even farther back than considered in the Gregg essay” (“Social Justice Theory: A Solution in Search of a Problem,” April 1, 2013, http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/social-justice-theory-a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem/,  accessed Oct. 22, 2013).

 

          Leonard Read: “My contention is that justice and so-called social justice are opposites and that to promote the latter is to retard the former” (Who’s Listening, 1973. p. 93).

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          “The formulas above are four ways of expressing substantially the same thought: justice- in contrast to a grant of privilege - is the absence of any deterrent to the creative aspirations of any individual. Let each person pursue his own ends so long as he does not impede the peaceful objectives of other individuals. Justice, when rightly defined, is ‘the cement of society,’ as Alexander Hamilton phrased it. We now come to what is euphemistically referred to as social justice, though it is in theory and practice the very opposite of justice. Social justice reflects the mood of our times. It is of ancient origin, to be sure, though still in use as a device that politicians and social planners find convenient to gain votes and power. Social justice has no case except the lust for position; it has no rational content and simply manifests the little-god syndrome” (Who’s Listening, 1973, pp. 95-96).

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          “In the practice of so-called social justice, the individual is ignored, absolutely! Instead, the population and the economy are dealt with in enormous lumps: individuals are vaguely classified into the haves and the have-nots, treated as voting blocs of farmers, wage earners, old folks, oppressed minorities, disaster victims, slum dwellers, and countless other legions in ‘the war on poverty’”(Who’s Listening, 1973. p. 96).

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          “Social justice is the game of ‘robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.’ This form of political behavior seeks the gain of some at the expense of others, and cannot be distinguished from Marx's ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’” (Who’s Listening, 1973, p. 96).

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          “Social justice promises to reward the idle by punishing and restraining those who have exercised creative energy” (Who’s Listening, 1973, p. 97).

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          "So-called social justice is man's greatest injustice to man, antisocial in every respect; not the cement of society, but the lust for power and privilege and the seed of man's corruption and downfall” (Who’s Listening, 1973, p. 97).

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          “Finally, social justice in no way fits the claim of its advocates: an expression of mercy and pity. These virtues are strictly personal attributes and are expressed only in the voluntary giving of one's own, never in the seizure and redistribution of someone else's possessions” (Who’s Listening, 1973, p. 97).

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          “Morally and ethically motivated citizens can condone a philosophy of so-called social justice only if they fail to see its terrible injustice”(Who’s Listening, 1973, p. 97).

 

          Alejandro A. Chafuen: From the moment that the term ‘social justice’ became a mandatory term in the lingo of Argentine politicians, the country went down the hill. This was during the mid-1940s, when Col. Juan Domingo Perón created the ‘Justicialista’ or the ‘Justice’ party. Perón, an admirer of Benito Mussolini, was following his recommendation: in each country where it would be adopted, fascism will need a new name. The Latin word ‘fasces,’ came from one of the symbols used by Romans to refer to justice. The fasces were the axes carried by magistrates as a symbol of government authority and its ability to punish and execute justice. Perón made social ‘justice’ a key pillar of his policies”(”Social Justice And Pope Francis: Choosing Freedom Over Serfdom,” http://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2013/03/20/social-justice-and-pope-francis-choosing-freedom-over-serfdom/,  accessed Oct. 6,2013).

 

          Sudha Shenoy: “The essence of the argument for ‘social’ justice is that the same rules that apply to everyone else need not be applied to one minority—the ‘rich.’ The rich, because they are rich, ought to be called upon to pay differential rates of taxa­tion—both on income and on wealth. Where compensation for some state activity is involved, it is generally agreed that full market prices need not be paid, especially if the indi­viduals involved are wealthier than others. In the case of strikers, it is agreed that they should not be held liable for acts against property (and persons) that in other con­texts would result in stiff penalties. All this represents a very great change of attitude from, say, about fifty years ago—and it goes under the heading of the achievement of social justice.

           I wonder, though, whether these advocates of ‘one law for the poor and another law for the rich,’ real­ize that they are adopting, in es­sence, the basic principle of all to­talitarian regimes everywhere?” (“Selective Justice,” December 1965, The Freeman, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/selective-justice/, accessed Nov. 29, 2011).

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          “But observe the inconsistency here: if Jews are subjected to different rules from those apply­ing to the non-Jews, this is called anti-Semitism; if blacks are sub­jected to different rules from the whites, this is called racism; but if the groups against whom dif­ferential rules are to apply are designated as ‘the rich,’ ‘capital­ists,’ ‘landlords,’ and the like—then it is no longer discrimina­tion: it is social justice!" (“Selective Justice,” December 1965, The Freeman, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/selective-justice/, accessed Nov. 29, 2011).

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          “The essence of justice, however, as opposed to ‘social’ pseudo jus­tice, is that the same rules should apply to all: the wrongness of the act should be defined in terms of the act and not in terms of who does it. The application of the rules must be defined independ­ently of the circumstances of those to whom the rules are intended to apply. Yet it is of the essence of the concept of ‘social justice’ that we must know who a person is before we can determine what rules to apply to him. Before as­sessing tax liability or the pay­ment of compensation, the income and wealth of the individual must be known (is he ‘rich’ or ‘poor’?)" (“Selective Justice,” December 1965, The Freeman, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/selective-justice/, accessed Nov. 29, 2011).

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          “Again, the notion of ‘social jus­tice’ embodies a principle which, if applied in our daily life, we would have no hesitation in term­ing immoral. What would a father have to say if his son came home with his friend’s book, and ex­cused his action thus, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Dad—he can afford it!’? Yet, how many of us lend sanc­tion to a progressive income tax or to confiscatory death duties on the grounds, ‘They can afford it’? ‘Social justice,’ in short, seems to be simply a way of providing a respectable cloak for the basic principle of injustice” (“Selective Justice,” December 1965, The Freeman, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/selective-justice/, accessed Nov. 29, 2011).

 

          Hans F. Sennholz: “A ‘social justice’ society is a conflict which locks beneficiaries and victims alike in a struggle without end.  It becomes a society torn apart by resentment over the wealth of capitalists” (http://www.investmentrarities.com/great_quotes.shtml, accessed Dec. 2, 2011).

 

          Mark Hendrickson: “The modern left’s ‘social justice’ strives for economic equality. It endeavors to reduce, if not erase, the gap between rich and poor by redistributing wealth. This is ‘justice’ more akin to Marx and Lenin, not according to Moses and Jesus. It is a counterfeit of real justice, biblical justice. Modern notions of ‘social justice’ are often wolves in sheep’s clothing.

          The fundamental error of today’s ‘social justice’ practitioners is their hostility to economic inequality, per se. ‘Social justice’ theory fails to distinguish between economic disparities that result from unjust deeds and those that are part of the natural order of things. All Christians oppose unjust deeds, and I’ll list some economic injustices momentarily. First, though, let us understand why it isn’t necessarily unjust for some people to be richer than others:

          God made us different from each other. We are unequal in aptitude, talent, skill, work ethic, priorities, etc. Inevitably, these differences result in some individuals producing and earning far more wealth than others. To the extent that those in the ‘social justice’ crowd obsess about eliminating economic inequality, they are at war with the nature of the Creator’s creation” (“The ‘Social Justice’ Fallacy? Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” April 7, 2010, http://townhall.com/columnists/markwhendrickson/2010/04/07/the_social_justice_fallacy_wolves_in_sheeps_clothing/page/full, accessed Oct 22, 2013).

 

          F.A. Hayek: “I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term ‘social justice” (The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976, p. 97).

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          “[The] prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to other values of a free civilization” (The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976, pp. 67-68).

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          “Indeed, in a market economy in which no single person or group determines who gets what, and the shares of individuals always depend on many circumstances which nobody could have foreseen, the whole conception of social or distributive justice is empty and meaningless; and there will therefore never exist agreement on what is just in this sense. I am not sure that the concept has a definite meaning even in a centrally-directed economy, or that in such a system people would ever agree on what distribution is just. I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. An adequate treatment of the topic of this lecture would indeed presuppose a careful dissection of this ideal which almost everybody seems to believe to have a definite meaning but which proves more completely devoid of such meaning the more one thinks about it” (“Economic Freedom and Representative” Fourth Wincott Memorial Lecture delivered at The Royal Society of Arts 31 October, 1973, p. 13).

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          “What I hope to have made clear is that the phrase ‘social justice’ is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate, but that it has become a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it. If political discussion is to become honest it is necessary that people should recognize that the term is intellectually disreputable, the mark of demagogy or cheap journalism which responsible thinkers ought to be ashamed to use because, once its vacuity is recognized, its use is dishonest” (The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976, p. 97).

 

          Yaron Brook (Ph.D Finance): “Social justice’ is the notion that everyone deserves an equal share of the wealth that exists in a nation--regardless of how productive he is. Justice, on this view, consists of seizing the wealth of the productive and giving it to the unproductive. This is the ideal preached and conscientiously put into practice by leftist dictators like Chavez.

          But it is precisely this type of envy-driven philosophy that is responsible for the wretched conditions in Latin America. It is no mystery why a nation that shackles and loots its most productive citizens should be weighed down by poverty and stagnation.

          President Bush should tell the people of Latin America to reject the immoral goal of ‘social justice’ and embrace the American principles of freedom and capitalism” (“Bush and Chavez the Two Amigos,” March 20, 2007, http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=15131, accessed Dec. 3, 2011).

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          [In response to a question at a lecture] “Social justice is an interesting term coming out of the Catholic Church, really as a way to combat capitalism, as a way to attack capitalism. The idea here is that justice is about the group; that justice is about sameness in some sense. Justice is about some form about equality; that no one is suffering. So that if one person is suffering here, then we take from another person and give to the person so that they are better off, so that they do not suffer. . .  

          I don’t think that is justice. I don’t think it’s just to take from some and give to others by force. I think that force is the opposite of justice, forcing people to behave in way they do not perceive – whether they’re right or wrong – that they do not perceive is in their self-interest is evil. It is wrong. The whole point of the establishment of this country was to eradicate force from human interaction. To have people free, free from force. And it is interesting because the founders also understood that the one entity that violated individual rights the most in all of human history and used force the most in all of human history was government. That’s why we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, to try to prevent government from infringing on our rights. . .

          But there is no such thing as group justice, social justice. We have to get away from the collectivistic terms that are being ingrained in us for decades now, that it’s all about groups and society. Society is nothing but a collection of individuals. And the answer to the question is that is there individual justice. Is it just to ask this guy to support that guy when he doesn’t want to. If he wants to then he can do it voluntarily. There nothing wrong with charity, there is nothing wrong with helping people. That’s fine. But the government doesn’t ask you to help, it forces you to help. When people go to government because they need health care, they are not asking the government to organize a charity, which the government shouldn’t do anyway.  They are asking the government to use force to take from somebody else. That’s unjust. The whole concept of social justice is a contradiction”(Talk given June 9, 2010 in Chicago Illinois: “Capitalism: Who Needs It” Part 5 of 8,  retrieved April 20, 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=vviWzdRMh6I. Sponsored by The Ayn Rand Institute).

 

          Sven Wilson: “The academic field of public health has been completely hi-jacked by the social justice people (mostly neomarxists and Rawlsians).  Even though political science, for example, has a lot of lefties, it is hard to imagine their meetings being so blantantly, militantly, and proudly ideological. Most social science organizations like to keep up at least the public pretense of objective, scientific research (even though that objectivity is often a sham.)  I presented a paper at the meetings of the Global Health Council this past summer in DC, and one of their headline events was arranging buses for attendees to actually go to Capitol Hill and lobby Congress.  (In addition to outrageously inappropriate, this struck me as outrageously comical: I can just picture all these advocates wandering around the capitol in their beards and Birkenstocks, chanting about social justice, and trying to get some Congressional committee aid to listen to them.) . . .

          The great sadness of this is that public health still has the potential to do great good in a world that is still racked by terrible misery.  Even in the developed world, serious public health questions persist.  In the past, public health interventions (such as cleaning up the water supply) were a gleaming example of how simple public efforts based on the best available science could do tremendous good.  Sure, the social justice crowd has infested English departments as well, but are people dying from preventable disease because the MLA is holding panels on fresh Marxist perspectives on why Milton and Shakespeare were racist pigs?  Some questions are just a lot more important than others when it comes to improving the conditions of humanity.

          The tragedy is that those people who might be putting forth solutions are, instead, ranting about the white corporate power structure and the evils of capitalism. They have no sense that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any institution developed by humankind.  In developed countries, preventable health problems and social inequalities in health are mostly about behavior.  But research and programs focused on behavior of the poor, minorities, or the less educated, is in the view of the social justice crowd, just ‘blaming the victims.’  Smoking, promiscuity, overeating, lack of exercise, risky behavior, these are the causes of poor health.  We can’t hold individuals accountable for those behaviors, nor are we allowed to point to social and cultural influences that profoundly shape those behaviors.  No, the blame must be placed at the feet of corporate CEOs and right-wing governments. (I wish my characterization here was an exaggeration for the sake of rhetoric, but sadly it isn't.) So, people continue to suffer, when some good actually might be done. Social injustice, indeed” (http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/public-health-and-the-injustice-of-social-justice/)

 

          Henry Hazlitt: “What the comparisons do show graphically is how almost universal the soak-the-rich tax philosophy has now become. An elaborate rationalization, on grounds of ‘social justice’ and ‘ability to pay,’ has been built up for progressive tax rates since the beginning of this century; but economists are at last beginning to recognize that all arguments in support of progression can be used to justify any degree of progression.

          Certainly there is no evidence that the steeply progressive rates have helped the poor. On the contrary, these confiscatory rates clearly undermine incentives, reduce production and capital accumulation, and leave less to be shared by everybody.

          The earliest sponsors of the progressive income tax recognized this, but they had other aims in mind. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels frankly proposed ‘a heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ as an instrument by which ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,' and to make 'despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production'" (Man vs. The Welfare State, 1969, pp 105-06).

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          “Now government-to-government aid rests on socialistic assumptions and promotes socialism and stagnation, whereas private foreign investment rests on capitalistic assumptions and promotes private enterprise and maximum economic growth.

          The egalitarian and socialistic assumptions underlying government-to-government aid are clear. Its main assumption is that the quickest way to ‘social’ justice and progress is to take from the rich and give to the poor, to seize from Peter and give to Paul. The donor government seizes the aid money from its supposedly over-rich taxpayers; it gives it to the receiving nation on the assumption that the latter ‘needs’ the money – and not on the assumption that it will make the most productive use of the money” (Man vs. the Welfare State, 1969, p. 171).

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          “Yet The Communist Manifesto and the quantity of socialist propaganda which it inspired continue to exert immense influence. Even many of those who profess themselves, quite sincerely, to be violently ‘anticommunist,’ feel that the most effective way to combat communism is to make concessions to it. Some of them accept socialism itself—but ‘peaceful’ socialism—as the only cure for the ‘evils’ of capitalism. Others agree that socialism in a pure form is undesirable, but that the alleged ‘evils’ of capitalism are real—that it lacks ‘compassion,’ that it does not provide a ‘safety net’ for the poor and unfortunate; that it does not redistribute the wealth ‘justly’—in a word, that it fails to provide ‘social justice.’ And all these criticisms take for granted that there is a class of people, our officeholders, or at least other politicians whom we could elect in their place, who could set this all right if they had the will to do so. And most of our politicians have been promising to do exactly that for the last half century. The trouble is that their attempted legislative remedies turn out to be systematically wrong” (The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt edited by H. Sennholz, Hans, 2011-08-05, Kindle Locations 1457-1468, Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition. Reprinted from The Freeman article from 1985).

 

          Benn Steil: “The fact that many people may, with the best of moral intentions, believe in the importance of certain claims to global social justice does not mean that there exist rules that can effectuate them without producing more global conflict rather than less” (Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, 2009, Kindle Location 694).

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          “Reducing global inequality as a principle of state action, however suggestive of an impeccable moral conscience, may well require curtailing fundamental rights underpinning free societies; free societies generally being one and the same with rich ones. Justice in a free society means treating individuals according to identical rules of conduct. If we are to supplement or replace the classical principle of justice, which applies to individual conduct, with one of global ‘social justice’ - or more precisely, ‘distributive justice’ - wherein no one shall acquire more benefits than a designated authority deems justified by the prevailing distribution of global wealth, the authority will of necessity need to treat individuals according to vastly different rules of conduct” (Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, 2009, (Kindle Locations 679-681).

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          “If the earth were merely a pile of commodities from which we could each effortlessly take a share, an equal global distribution would doubtlessly be both just and effective in maximizing the wealth of the poor (as there would be no meaning to rich and poor). But the earth is not like this. Many of the world's wealthiest countries are, in fact, commodity impoverished. Most wealth is created de novo in the process of applying ingenuity to comparatively worthless commodities, and the benefits flowing from consumers to providers in a free society bear no relation to any distributive or merit-based calculus. There can exist no principles of just conduct-which necessarily imply free choice-that would produce a pattern of wealth distribution which could also be called just.

          It is logically impossible to have a game in which both the actions of the players and the final score can be subject to rules of fairness. If it is unfair for one team to outscore another by more than a certain margin, the behavior of the players will have to be directed by the umpires. But if the players are to be free to act within rules off air play, the outcome logically cannot be said to be unfair. Likewise, if citizens following all the rules of just conduct become wealthy, there is no basis on which to condemn the resulting distribution of wealth as ‘unjust.’ If no one actually commits an injustice, then no moral principle can reconcile justice to individuals with social justice after the fact. Only in centrally directed social systems, such as the military, can social justice even make sense, as there are no rules of just conduct in settings where individuals are instructed what to do” (Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, 2009, Kindle Locations 682-685).

 

          Carl P. Close: “Yet recent decades have seen the rise of a new concept—‘social justice’—that denies a necessary connection between what one does and what one is due. According to theories of ‘social justice,’ someone may be entitled to income, opportunities, or power—and others may be compelled to provide those amenities—simply because some people possess them in relative abundance whereas others do not” (“Justice versus Social Justice,” Oct. 12, 2010, http://blog.independent.org/2010/10/12/justice-versus-social-justice/, accessed Jan. 12, 2012).

 

          Thomas J. DiLorenzo: “I suspected from the beginning that the libeling of Dr. Block was a set-up by the self-appointed Campus Thought Police, who never stop reminding everyone that they are in favor of ‘social justice.’ (The implication is that anyone who opposes their socialistic political agenda must be in favor of injustice.) It was this ‘social justice crowd’ on the Loyola campus who immediately claimed after Dr. Block's lecture that a student complained to them about the ‘insensitivity’ of Dr. Block's rendition of the economics of discrimination. Within twenty-four hours I learned that the university president was preparing his libelous letter despite the fact that he had neither attended the lecture nor contacted Dr. Block to ask him if the scurrilous slanders about him were true. I have always suspected that the student was sent to the seminar with specific instructions to cause trouble, which he did" (“Libelous Leftist Lynch Mobs,” Oct. 28, 2009, http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo178.html, accessed Nov. 29, 2011).

 

          Gary M. Galles: “Social justice is not universal justice, because it requires that rights be given to one person at the expense of another”(“Social Justice is Not Necessarily Justice,” November 18, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Circle-Bastiat/2011/1118/Social-justice-is-not-necessarily-justice, accessed Oct 23, 2013).

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          “If people thought as carefully about the massive misrepresentation that is entailed by claims of ‘social justice’ as Leonard Read, we would not be so far down the path to eviscerating justice in the name of a ‘new and improved’ justice. Yet, having moved down that path, the only route to improvement is to recognize the rhetorical cheat and reverse course. Leonard Read’s contrast between justice and social justice is a good start toward real progress in that direction — progress that entails undoing the ‘progressive’ political redefinition (or better, mis-definition) of justice” (“Social Justice is Not Necessarily Justice” November 18, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Circle-Bastiat/2011/1118/Social-justice-is-not-necessarily-justice, accessed Oct 23, 2013).

 

          Ludwig von Mises: “The earliest attempts to reform ownership and property can be accurately described as attempts to achieve the greatest possible equality in the distribution of wealth, whether or not they claimed to be guided by considerations of social utility or social justice. All should possess a certain minimum, none more than a certain maximum. All should possess about the same amount –that was, roughly, the aim. The means to this end were not always the same. Confiscation of all or part of the property was usually proposed, followed by redistribution” (Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 2010, Kindle Locations 824-828).

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          “Many advocates of [government] interventionism [into the economy] are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favor a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government. What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at.

         On the contrary, they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis, emerges” (Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 2010, Kindle Locations 7999-8008).

 

          Daniel B. Klein: “The Left is about collective romance. Read Marx closely, and at heart you will find the aspiration for encompassing sentiment. In Marx and the Leftist train, the collectivity is a vehicle of fulfillment and liberation. In collectivism we escape alienation, which Marx closely identified with the division of labor. In collectivism we achieve our humanness. . . And you can't satisfy them by writing nothing. They are akin to the Left's notion of ‘social justice,’ a sublime realization of collective beauty. Because ‘social justice’ doesn't work as a system of justice, David Hume called it ‘the vulgar definition of justice’” (“Red for Romance,” Feb 14, 2005, Pacific Research Institute, http://www.pacificresearch.org/press/red-for-romance).

 


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