| | Ed:
This is a nice piece. I want to comment on just one aspect:
Re: Welfare statists claim that life is a vale of tears and that the world is one big hospital where they need to dole out triage. They incessantly appeal to the "greater good." The health care bill talks about this, about how to treat folks who won't -- because of their age (either too young or too old) -- be able to do much for the "greater good."
Folks who understand justice as being more important than welfare -- because enforced justices is the keystone to all sustainable prosperity (and prosperity is needed for the very existence of "welfare") -- take the opposite view.
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I agree with Thomas Sowell's argument in "A Conflict of Visions" -- there are competing definitions of what justice is, and in some way, it is important to understand that 'welfare statists' believe they are fighting for their vision of 'justice.'
That is not to say, it is necessary to agree with that view of justice, or acknowledge its validity, but only that the motivations of 'welfare statists', internally, as far as they are concerned, are based on their pursuit of their view of 'justice.'
Sowell neatly categorized the two camps as 'process based justice' vs. 'outcome based justice,' and the two views are infinitely non-reconcilable. Process based justice, simply stated, is belief in a consistent set of rules, applicable to all, such that any outcomes, no matter what they are, are arrived at justly. Outcome based justice is a belief in rigging the rules to guarantee equal outcomes for all, no matter what. As in Vonnegut's lead weighted ballerinas.
Under process based justice, there is no coerced limit aimed at the top half and bottom half. Both the self directed heights of the top half, as well as the self directed depths of the bottom half, are primarily limited by self practice under the common set of process based rules. Although, subscribers to this ideal, such as Hayek, also embrace the concept of a 'safety net' below which citizens would be encouraged not to fall, limited welfare, the real villain in this world, according to its opponents, isn't the rising level of that safety-net, but the unlimited heights of the top half. In order to sell this as villainy, they have to paint a child-like image of our economies as Poker Games, with a fixed amount of chips, or a mythical One Pie World, where every slice of pie in someone hands is by necessity taken from some other. Nonsense, that is not the way money works in healthy economies, only in cartoon concepts like 'The' Economy.
As well, such freedom, based on value-for-value, is demagogued as 'dog eat dog.'
There is also a clear political instability in this freedom; the bottom 51% is always woo-able by promises to eat the top 49% on their behalf, and that is the exposed path to power that freedom under process based justice exposes.
Under outcome based view of justice, the rules of process are infinitely and arbitrarily riggable on a person by person basis, whatever is necessary, to try to achieve equal outcomes for all, usually based on arguments of ability/need and endless claims of right to subsidy. The inevitable outcome of this is two miserable souls in rags, fighting in a hovel, showing each other their runny sores, arguing over who has the 'right' to the not so maggoty piece of rotted meat on that basis.
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