Against social justice - I

"Social justice" is the tool by which governments have destroyed the idea of liberty. Some libertarians, like Hayek, have criticized its theory and accepted its practise (may be to make the idea of liberty more appealing?); only consistent libertarians have criticized the idea itself. Anyway, consistency is rare among classical liberals, and the health of this statist idea should not surprise anyone. The idea of "social justice" itself, anyway, shall be criticized, because it is incompatible with classical liberalism and libertarianism.

"Social justice" is an ensemble of normative instances (judgements of value) which assert, briefly, that each individual is entitled to obtain several goods and services as an individual, without considering its contribution to their production.

Let us consider the "right" to nourishment: each individual has a "right" to obtain food, nothwithstanding his efforts (or lack of efforts) in obtaining food. So, each individual has the "right" to be fed by others, even if he spends all his days tanning in his garden under the sun.

This means that someone else has the duty to nourish him: someone shall be compelled to farm wheat, back bread and offer the previous individual a sandwich while he is tanning... "Social justice" implies the imposition of juridical duties over other people. Besides, we have a clear example of externalities: the costs of obtaining food are externalized on others, who will be forced to foot the bill. Everybody will have the same idea, and no one will be willing to work (this is not a description of reality, but a reductio ad absurdum). It is clear that these externalities do create parasitism, disincentives to work, etcetera.

This legal duty is, to say the least, curious: Texas people should be forced to "help" Wyoming people. And why shouldn't Canadian people be compelled to help Polish people? Don't they require more "social justice" than the inhabitants of Wyoming?

Not enough absurdities, so far, so we can go on: these "rights" are so strange that poor people enjoying them may be worse off than without them. Consider children labour: ok, it is better to play with Barbie than working in a mine. I see no reason to derive from this obvious sentence that they shall be forced to stop working in the mine: the outcome will not be more playing with dolls, but more poverty, starvation, child abuse, chile prostitution, children labour, black markets...

But the poverty of "social justice" does not end here: it is easy to show that, if democracy were a serious thing, "social justice" would be useles... in fact, if the majority of the people wants poor relief... why don't they relieve the poor with their own means? They are the majority: they have (roughly) one half of the total amount of social material resources. If we add that in a free market there would be less poor in need of help, we reach the conclusion that "social justice" is hypocrite: everybody wants to be a do-gooder, by with other peoples' means.

No, the list is not finished, yet: what about the concentration of a limitless power in the hands of politicians, who have the power to scatter costs and benefit throughout society without being constrained by any other limit than their own quest for power? "Social justice" requires a large, and expensive bureaucracy; a powerful ruling classe, a gigantic fiscal system. Do you really believe that all this power will be employed to help the poor? Uh? A normative idea which may be extended to every single aspect of human life, because its content is vague, to say the least, and may be used, thus, to justify any power, any coercion, any prevarication... we must be fool in believing in "social justice".

People who are naive enough to keep on believing in democracy, probably consider government a sort of blackboard on which they can write their will, sum it to other people's will, and obtain an optimal social policy (whatever this means, if it means something). The mother of fools is always pregnant: in reality, political decision mechanisms influence political choices. Organized political pressure groups are almost always the winners in this lottery, notwithstanding the fact they are, in general, small minorities. There is no reason to believe that the poor will see any advantage from this process.

Libertarian ("natural") rights are not simply different from social (socialist?) "rights": they are incompatible. Liberty only imposes on others not to kill, beat and defraud us; "social rights" give us the ideological justification to use the rest of manking as a means fo our aims, using coercion against them. "Social justice" is serfdom. Besides, libertarian rights can be "universal", because it is always possible, or at least conceivable, to respect them: "social rights" depend on the level of economic development, on the other hand, and they are likely to hamper this development on which they depend.

This was an introduction: a "manifesto against social justice". In the near future, I will post some argument in defense of these theses.