Enforcing “Social Justice” and “Economic Justice”

The New York Governor’s Understanding of Justice

I had a nice chat yesterday with an editorial writer for the New York Sun, with whom I discussed the decision by New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to appoint two new deputy attorneys general responsible for “social justice” and “economic justice.” (Their editorial appeared today, “Cuomo-Speak.”)

The move is a simple rejection of justice itself. As Anthony de Jasay and others have pointed out, whenever you add a qualifying term such as “social,” “economic,” “gender,” “racial,” “national,” or the like to the term “justice,” what is intended is something other than justice. (Hayek argued in the second volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, titled The Mirage of Social Justice that “social” is a weasel word: like a weasel getting into a hen house and sucking the content out of the eggs, it sucks the meaning out of words, leaving just empty shells.)

Displacing justice with “social justice” or “economic justice” replaces the rule of law with arbitrary power and undermines the equality of persons before the law. As F. A. Hayek argued in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom,

A necessary, and only apparently paradoxical, result of this is that formal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy aiming at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. (Chicago, 1944, repr. 1969, p. 79)

The last thing we — or the people of New York — need is two deputy attorneys general, armed with the awesome prosecutorial power of the state and charged with imposing on all the rest of the population their visions of “economic justice” and “social justice.”