Indeed such a voter may obtain personal psychic benefits from pursuit of social justice. For instance, regardless of personal character, he can consider himself morally superior to his fellows insofar as he, the social justice advocate, supports the “right” social policies, policies that help the disadvantaged, overlooking the fact that such compassion comes at the expense of other people. Such self-styled virtue cannot be accepted at face value. The altruistic political activist, the “social justice warrior” who militantly advocates for governmental programs to help the homeless and other “victims” of society certainly has no claim to inherent moral superiority. Such a role can be played by persons of any moral caliber, even those, for instance, who might cavalierly step over a drunkard lying in the gutter. The political advocate for social justice need take no personal action in order to regard himself as virtuous. He need do nothing more than vote for the allegedly morally superior policy (funded by someone other than himself), that is, do nothing more than force other people to “do good.”
It is difficult to respect the impulses behind what passes for moral superiority in the eyes of contemporary advocates of social justice. Indeed, such a political stance seems rather to typify what Irving Babbitt once dismissed as morality based on “sham vision,” which indeed may partially explain its appeal.[114] Morality as traditionally conceived within Judeo-Christian civilization generally involves individual or personal effort, in the present case, a personal effort to help the homeless. Such effort generally involves sacrifice of personal resources, of one’s own time and one’s own money. Moreover, and most important, traditional morality presupposes moral action to be voluntary action. It makes no sense to either castigate action as bad or praise it as good if the agent has no choice in the matter; no rational person morally condemns or praises an individual for having blue eyes.[115] The appealing rhetoric of social justice and the altruistic social morality it advances cloaks a kind of moral blindness. Traditional morality cannot be realized by forcing other persons to do good, whether by pointing a gun or voting for politically imposed redistribution. The good, to be good, must be willingly pursued, and this requires freedom of choice. Governmental redistribution of wealth, like the point of a gun, eliminates such choice, forcing certain persons to transfer their resources to other persons under penalty of law, whether they will or not. Such policies violate not only freedom and justice but the fundamental moral injunction against theft. A law is not a suggestion, and forced “charity” is not charity.
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About the Author
Linda C. Raeder is Professor of Politics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, FL. She is the author of numerous scholarly publications exploring the nature and development of the Western liberal tradition, including a monograph on the religious thought of J.S. Mill, chapters and articles on Hayek, Burke, Marx, Augustine, Voegelin, and related subjects. She received the Ph.D. in politics and American government from The Catholic University of America and serves as both associate editor of the academic journal Humanitas (Washington, DC) and senior fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee. In 2017 she was recipient of the Charles and Hazel Corts Award for outstanding teaching.
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[1] F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, in 3 volumes, Rules and Order, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 12. Hereinafter cited as Rules and Order.
[2] Consider, for instance, relevant statistical comparisons of West and East Germany, South and North Korea, and Taiwan and China for the period 1960-1988. “Communism, Capitalism, and Economic Development: Implications for U.S. Economic Assistance,” Backgrounder No. 41 (Heritage Foundation: Washington DC, Dec. 8, 1989).
[3] We here exclude general governmental regulations that apply universally to all members of society.
[4] F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 153. Hereinafter cited as Constitution of Liberty.
[5] Nicholas Capaldi and Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, America’s Spiritual Capital (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2012).
[6] Famously summarized by Adam Ferguson as “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design,” An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London: T. Cadell, 1767).
[7] According to Hayek, the conceptions of spontaneous order and organization are more or less equivalent to Michael Oakeshott’s conceptions of the “nomocratic,” purpose-independent, “civil association” (societas) and the “teleocratic,” end-dependent, “enterprise association” (universitas). Hayek, Rules and Order, 15.
[8] Hayek (1973) defines the concept of order as a “state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct” (Rules and Order, 36). The relations that structure a spontaneous social order include such abstract social relations as buyer and seller; lessor and lessee; lender and borrower; producer and consumer; judge and litigant; and so on.
[9] F. A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review (American Economic Association Association) XXXV (4): 519-30.
[10] As I write, the press is reporting the forced labor mandated by Maduro in socialist Venezuela.
[11] Although producers also generate demand for the specific inputs they utilize in the production of their final goods.
[12] See also “The Function of the Capitalist,” pp. 131-139.
[13]
[14] Assuming that the institutional requirements of the market—private property, the rule of law, and mutual trust—are in place.
[15] In finance, rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. The amount of money gained or lost may be referred to as interest, profit/loss, gain/loss, or net income/loss. The money invested may be referred to as the asset, capital, principal, or the cost basis of the investment. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage rather than a fraction.
[16] Parents may engage in the conscious selection of goods that they subsequently “distribute” among their children.
[17] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans, ed, intro, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1835]), p. 500.
[18] Again, leaving aside inherited wealth.
[19] There may of course be occasional exceptions, cases in which customers deliberately purchase from a given seller in order to assist that person financially
[20] Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Crown Business, 1988). Hereinafter cited as Economics.
[21] Frederic Bastiat, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen” (1850), cited in Hazlitt, Economics.
[22] Amity Shales, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (NY: Harper Perennial, 2008).
[23] Paul Krugman, “Reckonings; After the Horror,” Opinion Page, New York Times, Sept. 14, 2001.
[24] Hayek maintains that classical liberalism is an ideology in the sense that it is a consistent set of principles and beliefs that constitute a worldview. Most scholars, however, reserve the term for the totalitarian movements as discussed above. See Hayek, “Why I am Not a Conservative,” in Constitution, 397-411.
[25] Cited in Hayek, Rules and Order, 53.
[26] Communist Manifesto, 486.
[27] Ibid., 484.
[28] The slogan is conventionally attributed to Marx (“Jeder nach seinen Faehigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Beduerfnissen” (Critique of the Gotha Program [Marx-Engels Reader, 531]), but it was common to the socialist movement and employed by earlier socialists such as Etienne-Gabriel Morelly and Louis Blanc.
[29] Accidents of birth, luck, chance, “animal spirits,” booms, and busts, and so on.
[30] F. A. Hayek, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” Lecture at the reception at which Hayek, jointly with Gunnar Myrdal, received the Sveriges Riksbank prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, 1974. (Dec. 11, 1974)
[31]Hayek, Rules and Order, 14.
[32] Adam Smith, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, 233-4
[33] “. . . [T]here is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 7, 1848.
[34] The phrase was coined by communist journalist Joseph Wedemeyer in 1852 and adopted by Marx and Engels.
[35] Source: OECD (2016), General government spending (indicator). doi: 10.1787/a31cbf4d-en; www.usgovernmentspending.com
[36] The Affordable Care Act of 2010.
[37] G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian Essays in Socialism (London: Fabian Society, 1889).
[38] The Fabians took their name from the Roman general Fabius, who developed carefully planned strategies to achieve ultimate victory by slowly wear down his enemies over a long period of time.
[39] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed, Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007).
[40] Such a politico-economic system is sometimes referred to as “special interest liberalism” or the “corporate-welfare state.”
[41] Milton Friedman, Capitalism & Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Dominick T. Armentano, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 1996; Yale Brozen, Is Government the Source of Monopoly? And Other Essays (Washington DC: Cato Institute, 1980); Sylvester Petro, “Competition, Monopoly, and the Role of Government” (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1959).
[42] Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industria
l Complex Speech,” 1961. Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Washington DC: National Archives [Federal Depository Library] 1960), 1035-1040.
[43] Milton Friedman, Capitalism & Freedom, 148. Awarded Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.
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