Reaction Essay to Gaus at Cato Unbound

|Peter Boettke|

Here is my reaction essay --- Living Better Together --- to Gearld Gaus's "The Range of Justice."

Comments

[Daniil Gorbatenko]

The public choice (including Austrian public choice) practicality of the framework that Gaus suggests is not the only problem.

His idea misses the target because there are actually no basic principles, e.g. libertarians and progressives could agree on.

First of all, there are many libertarianisms. But more importantly, contrary to all libertarianisms, most progressives really believe that at a given level of wealth (progress) each citizen must be endowed with certain goodies.

This basic conflict of values may not be resolved by the Gaus's framework.

[Greg Ransom]

The problem always has been how to secure "analytic egalitarianism" when there is massive wealth & power inegalitarianism, with massive leverage by elite dominated hierarchical structures over both rule making and rule apologetics, especially when institutions exist which allow people to highly leverage their wealth & power (e.g. of folks who do so would include Putin, labor leaders, doctors, financiers, developers, politicians, education guilds, etc.)

We haven't solved this problem.