Try this at your next party. Ask your guests to define the term Social Justice.
Okay, it's not Charades or Twister, but it
should generate some interesting conversation, especially if your guests are on the political Left.
Since everyone on that side of the spectrum talks incessantly about social justice,
they should be able to provide a good definition, right?
But ask ten liberals to tell you what they mean by social justice and you’ll get ten
different answers. That’s because Social Justice means anything
its champions want it to mean.
Almost without exception, labor unions, universities and colleges, private foundations and public charities
claim at least part of their mission to be the spreading of Social Justice far and wide.
Here’s the Mission Statement of the AFL-CIO,
but it could be the mission statement for a thousand such organizations:
“The mission of the AFL-CIO is to improve the lives of working families -- to bring economic justice
to the workplace, and social justice to our nation.”
In short, “social justice” is code for good things no one needs to argue for --
and no one dare be against.
This very much troubled the great economist Friedrich Hayek.
This is what he wrote in 1976, two years after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.
“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’.”
Why was Hayek so upset by what seems like such a positive, and certainly unobjectionable term?
Because Hayek, as he so often did, saw right
to the core of the issue. And what he saw frightened him.
Hayek understood that beneath the political opportunism and intellectual laziness of the
term “social justice” was a pernicious philosophical claim,
namely that freedom must be sacrificed in order to redistribute income.
Ultimately, “social justice” is about the state amassing ever increasing power in
order to, do “good things.” What are good things?
Well, whatever the champions of social justice decide this week.
But first, last and always it is the cause of economic redistribution.
According to the doctrine of Social Justice, the haves always have too much, the have nots,
never have enough. You don’t have to take my word for it.
That is precisely how a UN report on Social Justice defines the term:
“Social justice may be broadly understood as the fair and compassionate distribution
of the fruits of economic growth.
Social justice is not possible without strong and coherent redistributive policies
conceived and implemented by public agencies.” I repeat: “Strong and coherent redistributive
policies conceived and implemented by public agencies.”
And it gets worse.
The UN report goes on to insist that: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified
with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders
of social justice.” Translation: if you believe truth and justice
are concepts independent of the agenda of the forces of progress as defined by the left,
you are an enemy of social justice.
Compassion – or social justice -- is when government takes your money and gives it to someone else.
Greed is when you want to keep it.
The underlying point of social justice, then, amounts to a sweeping indictment of a free society.
It suggests that any perceived unfairness,
or sorrow, or economic want must be addressed by yet another government effort to remedy
that unfairness, that sorrow, or that economic want.
All we need to do is invoke the abracadabra phrase “social justice” and we’re on our way.
The invocation of social justice always works from the assumption that the right people
– the anointed few – can simply impose fairness, prosperity and any other good thing
you can think of. And the only institution capable of imposing social justice is the state.
And keep in mind, the conventional wisdom among liberal elites
is that conservatives are the ones who want to impose their values on everyone else.
The self-declared champions of social justice believe the state must remedy and can remedy
all perceived wrongs. Anyone who disagrees is an enemy of what is
good and right. And the state must therefore coerce them
to do what is socially just. And that, as Hayek prophesied, is no longer a free society.
Is that the kind of society you want to live in?
If it isn’t, beware of what will be done in the name of social justice.
I’m Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute and National Review for Prager University.