Question

The Libertarian position involves two elements: (1) Liberty/freedom is very morally important: (2) Nothing else is nearly as important The following quote by Walter Williams, Economics Professor at George Mason University and columnist, speaks primarily to the first point: At the heart of most interventionist policy is a vision of justice. Most often this vision evaluates the presence of justice by looking at results. Social justice has considerable appeal and as such is used as justification for interventionist statism. ... [D]efenders of personal liberty must make a greater effort to demystify the term and show that justice or faimess cannot be determined by examining results. The results people often tum to in order to determine the presence or absence of justice are educational and occupational status, income, life expectancy, and other socioeconomic factors. But justice or fairness cannot be determined by results. It is a process question. "The Argument for Free Markets: Morality vs Efficiency." Cato Loumal. 15:2-3 (Fall/Winter 1995/96). The following quote from Amartya Sen, Economics Professor at Harvard and Nobel Laureate, speaks primarily to the second point: [T]his robustness' and the immunity from empirical critiques are also plausible sources of skepticism about that ethical structure. Why must we accept the priority of these rights? Do the rights of ownership and exchange have foundational' status? Must we really accept the notion that some arrangements required by the recognition of these rights are morally acceptable irrespective of their consequences - however bad they might be? What if the consequences are totally disastrous? The last is not only a matter of purely theoretical speculation.... [M]any large famines - in which millions of people have perished from hunger and hunger-related discases have taken place (even in the recent past) without any overall decline in food availability at all, with no 'natural cause making the famines inescapable. People have been deprived of food precisely because of sudden and violent shifts in 'entitlements, resulting from the exercise of rights that people legitimately have within the given legal system. Loss of employment and wage income have often led to starvation. Changes of relative prices have sometimes driven the losers to the wall.... In fact, it is easy to show that, with a system of rights justified independently of consequences, it is possible to have disasters of this kind occurring without anyone violating anyone else's rights at all. The contingency of ownership, as well as influences that determine transfers and terms of trade, can easily lead a particular occupation group into absolute deprivation, destitution, and decimation, without anything illegitimate and perverse having happened from a rights' perspective. It is not irrelevant to ask the question: If such starvation and famine were to occur, must the results of the market operation be taken as 'acceptable, simply because they have followed, from people legitimately exercising the rights they have? It is not easy to understand why rules of ownership, transfer, etc., should have such absolute priority over the life and death of millions of people. **Moral Standing of the Market," Social Philosophy & Policy 22 (Spring 1985)

Answer 1

Solution :

Freedom’s first principle is each person owns himself. For individual freedom to be viable, it must be a part of the shared values of a society, and there must be an institutional framework to preserve it against encroachments by majoritarian or governmentwill.

Constitutions and laws alone cannot guarantee the survival of personal freedom as is apparent where Western-style constitutions and laws have been exported to countries not having a tradition of individual freedom. In all interventionist policy there are those who are beneficiaries and those who are victims. In most cases the beneficiaries are highly visible and the victims are invisible. A good example is the minimum wage law. After enactment of an increase in the minimum wage law, politicians accompanied by television crews readily point to people who have benefitted from the legislation.

The most popular justification for the interventionist state is to create or ensure fairness and justice in the distribution of income. Considerable confusion, obfuscation, and demagoguery regarding the sources ofincome provide statists with copious quantities of ammunition to justify their redistributionist agenda. Income is not distributed. In a free society, income is earned. People serving one anotherthrough the provision of goods and services generate income.