Posted by
Josh Todd on Monday, August 04, 2008 11:23:43 PM
That advocates of cosmic justice pursue a utopian, and thus impossible, conclusion requires a third party to "wield power to control outcomes." This is what F.A. Hayek would have called "distributive justice." In other words, an "enlightened" power would divvy out justice as he or she saw fit according to his or her conception of justice.
To such people, a free market world where individuals act in the context of the rule of law (again, rules known in advance) leads to inevitable inequalities. This, to them, is injustice.
But as Thomas Sowell wrote, "If some group is not receiving justice, then whether this is due to governmental or private actions is seen as secondary." Injustice, or unequal results, is unacceptable.
What naturally follows is the plea for an overseer. Sowell wrote that when injustice exists, "someone must oversee the social results of these transactions and intervene directly to ensure that the desired results or prospects are arranged." Hayek described such a situation in this way: “To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently.”
In other words, "[S]omeone must be empowered to constrict other people's freedom."
And in the case of Barack Obama, we find such tendencies in several areas. This past week, he suggested taxing oil companies and cutting rebate checks to taxpayers. Why? The people have suffered injustice at the hands of profiting oil companies. More on this subject in a later post.
Another example: Obama spoke of raising the capital gains tax, but only on the rich. Why? The rich, he said, didn't deserve their tax cuts--that is, they didn't deserve to keep money they earned in a free market system where individuals voluntarily enter into transactions with one another.
Here, Barack Obama is directly attacking the concept of traditional justice, a system where the players play according to the same set of rules—that is, they are governed by laws, not by men. Victors are victorious as a result of competition, which Obama and his intellectual bedfellows see as creating injustice.
Yet, as Hayek wrote, "under competition the probability that a man who starts poor will reach great wealth is much smaller than is true of the man who has inherited property, it is not only possible for the former, but the competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on him and not on the favors of the mighty, and where nobody can prevent a man from attempting to achieve this result.” That is, the American way: lifting one’s self up by one’s boot straps.
Traditional justice tells us that this is the better way because "the mighty" does not exist, only men playing the same game, even if they vary in ability, interest, etc.
For Obama, such conditions will not do and they require "change" laced with "hope," a "new direction." But the mitigating factor is his set of policy positions. A Barack Obama presidency would bring: higher taxation on successful, hard-working people and additional programs to move that income to third parties who have "suffered injustice" and mandated energy policies aimed at service justice for the planet and for the poor. An overseer would ensure these ends.
Unfortunately for the United States, an overseer intervening to ensure desired results will require the executive branch to "constrict other people's freedom" in the name of cosmic justice. Hayek wrote, "[A]ny policy aiming directly at a substantive idea of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the rule of law.”
In other words, the overseer would be another step back in the direction from which we came.