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Try this at your next party. Ask your guests to define the term Social Justice.
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Okay, it's not Charades or Twister, but it
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should generate some interesting conversation, especially if your guests are on the political Left.
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Since everyone on that side of the spectrum talks incessantly about social justice,
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they should be able to provide a good definition, right?
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But ask ten liberals to tell you what they mean by social justice and you’ll get ten
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different answers. That’s because Social Justice means anything
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its champions want it to mean.
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Almost without exception, labor unions, universities and colleges, private foundations and public charities
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claim at least part of their mission to be the spreading of Social Justice far and wide.
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Here’s the Mission Statement of the AFL-CIO,
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but it could be the mission statement for a thousand such organizations:
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“The mission of the AFL-CIO is to improve the lives of working families -- to bring economic justice
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to the workplace, and social justice to our nation.”
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In short, “social justice” is code for good things no one needs to argue for --
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and no one dare be against.
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This very much troubled the great economist Friedrich Hayek.
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This is what he wrote in 1976, two years after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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“I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men
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would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever
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again to employ the term ‘social justice’.”
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Why was Hayek so upset by what seems like such a positive, and certainly unobjectionable term?
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Because Hayek, as he so often did, saw right
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to the core of the issue. And what he saw frightened him.
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Hayek understood that beneath the political opportunism and intellectual laziness of the
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term “social justice” was a pernicious philosophical claim,
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namely that freedom must be sacrificed in order to redistribute income.
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Ultimately, “social justice” is about the state amassing ever increasing power in
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order to, do “good things.” What are good things?
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Well, whatever the champions of social justice decide this week.
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But first, last and always it is the cause of economic redistribution.
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According to the doctrine of Social Justice, the haves always have too much, the have nots,
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never have enough. You don’t have to take my word for it.
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That is precisely how a UN report on Social Justice defines the term:
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“Social justice may be broadly understood as the fair and compassionate distribution
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of the fruits of economic growth.
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Social justice is not possible without strong and coherent redistributive policies
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conceived and implemented by public agencies.” I repeat: “Strong and coherent redistributive
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policies conceived and implemented by public agencies.”
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And it gets worse.
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The UN report goes on to insist that: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified
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with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders
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of social justice.” Translation: if you believe truth and justice
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are concepts independent of the agenda of the forces of progress as defined by the left,
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you are an enemy of social justice.
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Compassion – or social justice -- is when government takes your money and gives it to someone else.
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Greed is when you want to keep it.
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The underlying point of social justice, then, amounts to a sweeping indictment of a free society.
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It suggests that any perceived unfairness,
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or sorrow, or economic want must be addressed by yet another government effort to remedy
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that unfairness, that sorrow, or that economic want.
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All we need to do is invoke the abracadabra phrase “social justice” and we’re on our way.
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The invocation of social justice always works from the assumption that the right people
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– the anointed few – can simply impose fairness, prosperity and any other good thing
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you can think of. And the only institution capable of imposing social justice is the state.
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And keep in mind, the conventional wisdom among liberal elites
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is that conservatives are the ones who want to impose their values on everyone else.
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The self-declared champions of social justice believe the state must remedy and can remedy
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all perceived wrongs. Anyone who disagrees is an enemy of what is
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good and right. And the state must therefore coerce them
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to do what is socially just. And that, as Hayek prophesied, is no longer a free society.
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Is that the kind of society you want to live in?
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If it isn’t, beware of what will be done in the name of social justice.
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I’m Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute and National Review for Prager University.