I want to start with a simple thought
experiment for the Libertarians and
classical liberals out there
suppose that the harshest critics of the
free market were right and you were
wrong about the way in which free
markets actually work suppose that free
markets really do lead the rich to get
richer and the poor to get poorer
suppose they lead the poor and working
classes to live lives of constant and
increasing alienation in which they're
continually subject to exploitation and
domination by those with greater
economic power if all this were true
would you still support the free market
if not or if you'd have second thoughts
then I want to suggest that this means
you think that how the poor fair under
free markets is more than just an
attractive selling point for free market
views it's a crucial element in their
moral justification and if you believe
that as I think many libertarians and
classical liberals do and perhaps you're
not so far off from believing in an idea
that most libertarians think they reject
the idea of social justice as I
explained in a previous video a lot of
libertarians and classical liberals
oppose the idea of social justice
because they think it ignores the way in
which society is a spontaneous order in
a free society who gets what in terms of
opportunities and wealth isn't
determined by a central distributor it's
determined by the innumerable decisions
of countless individuals but therefore
makes no sense to talk about the justice
or injustice of social distributions as
a whole only about the justice or
injustice of the particular actions of
particular individuals now this is an
important insight and one that many
advocates of social justice should learn
from but even if we grant this point
there's still a problem for the
libertarian classical liberal view a
problem is this who ends up with what in
terms of money jobs or opportunities
isn't merely a product of the
decentralized decisions of private
individuals it's also partly a function
of the legal and social rules under
which those individuals operate
Derek Jeter for example makes a lot of
money playing baseball but as wealth
isn't just the inevitable result of his
natural skill it's the result of that
skill combined with legal rules defining
and enforcing property rights rules of
contract taxation and so on rules like
these don't determine exactly how any
particular person in society will fare
compared to anyone else but they do
affect the overall patterns of
distribution in society think about
minimum wage policies for example most
economists believe that these policies
create unemployment and have an
especially destructive impact on those
workers with the fewest marketable
skills we might not know how such laws
will affect any particular person but we
do know the broad effects these laws
will have on classes of persons but what
this means is that there's nothing
stopping us from using this information
in our moral evaluation of social
institutions in other words even
libertarians can hold that part of what
makes a society just or unjust is the
way in which it's legal and social rules
predictably affect different groups of
people and this leads us to a surprising
conclusion because what this means is
that there might be much less difference
between a libertarian like Friedrich
Hayek and a liberal egalitarian like
John Rawls than you might have
previously thought in fact I want to
claim that libertarians can agree with
Rawls his famous claim that a just
society will be one whose rules tend to
work to the maximum advantage of the
least well-off classes and in his famous
book the constitution of Liberty Hayek
himself did agree with Rawls on just
this very point I agreed with Rawls
about the end at which social
institutions should aim the welfare of
the least advantage he simply disagreed
about the means Rawls thought would get
us there and this is an important point
we can embrace a theory of social
justice without believing that the state
has to do anything to try to directly
promote the welfare the least well-off
like funding welfare programs or medical
care with tax revenues a theory of
social justice as I described it tells
us only what ends a set of legal rules
ought to try to achieve it doesn't tell
us how
to achieve those ends whether government
programs designed to directly aid the
poor are entailed by a theory of social
justice then depends on whether those
programs actually do help the poor not
just on whether we hope that they do and
a lot of evidence suggests that many
programs that attempt to help the poor
often hurt them in ways that are often
difficult to predict a theory of social
justice is therefore dependent on the
insights of economics and other social
sciences to tell us how to go about
achieving the ends it sets forth and
this is something that supporters of
social justice could learn from
supporters of the free market when it
comes to helping the poor it's not
enough to have one's heart in the right
place or even to have the right view
about what the poor deserve we also need
to know which policies are going to work
trying to help the poor with policies
like the minimum wage that actually hurt
them is more than ineffective it's
arguably a gross case of social
injustice in and of itself
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