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1/16/2003 11:21:00 PM | Timothy What happens to you if you grow up with John Rawls as your father? You become anti-big government free-market economist, of course. No kidding (but read my comments below): What happens when your father is not only a liberal, but one of the most prominent liberal political philosophers in the country? Ask Alec Rawls, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Stanford and son of the famous Harvard professor John Rawls. Although the elder Rawls is very circumspect on day-to-day political issues, his magnum opus The Theory of Justice provides a philosophic justification for the welfare state, and modern liberals have adopted him enthusiastically. Alec, on the other hand, is a free-market maven who excoriates the welfare state as both unconstitutional and insane. Alec downplays the political differences between himself and his dad, insisting their conceptions of moral philosophy are at the core quite similar. He concludes, however, that his father’s “principles of justice” err in their emphasis on equalizing the human condition. “Most of those who consider themselves my father’s followers embrace equality as an ultimate end or value in itself. That is the source of the politics of resentment that characterizes the illiberal Left.” “I think my parents had a naïve optimism in the 1960s, and thought that just by going after the problems of poverty they would be competently resolved,” notes the younger Rawls. “I don’t think my father was aware—as we are all aware now—of what goes wrong when we give government too much power.” Alec, who has worked as a carpenter to pay for both his undergraduate and graduate education, holds a more pessimistic view of government. “I love carpentry, but the government does idiotic things with building codes and licenses. Licenses are a government-sponsored monopoly, and building codes do not let people do what they want to do with their own property,” Rawls complains. “We need to use markets and individual choice over regulations, laws, and socialism.” From The American Enterprise. (via Julian Sanchez, a one-time parliamentary debater, I believe.) Before I hear the conservatives snicker, it really isn't fair to judge parents by how their kids rebel against them, is it? (sixties radicals had parents much unlike themselves as well!) And we shouldn't discard out of hand Alec Rawls' claim about his philosophy being close to his father's. After all, Friedrich Hayek, Thatcherite hero, praised Rawls' Theory of Justice (For reasons that are debated and not entirely clear to me-- but one example is that most people don't remember how far Hayek went in endorsing the welfare state in his book The Constitution of Liberty). Rawls (who died recently) would endorse at least something like the welfare state, but he left it up for grabs in The Theory of Justice of how the difference principle would actually be fulfilled (ie. he didn't say we had to abolish free-markets and do something like move to socialism). On the other hand, the younger Rawls is very different from his father: he writes for the Stanford Review and seems to use strident and direct rhetoric when expressing his political views. Check out these opinion columns from rawls.org. Someone ought to interview this guy. I never thought I would hear John Rawls' son say stuff like this: Where animal rights activists go wrong is in their identification of use with harm. It is the old Marxist-socialist-communist canard that markets are bad because they "exploit." We all need to be exploited. We need to have markets value what we have to offer, and take it from us, or we can't live. The same goes for animals. By having flesh and hide to offer, they earn life till maturity. The alternative is not life until they die of old age. It is no life. African-Americans have a serious problem with guns. They don't have enough of them. Despite being victimized by crime at several times the rate of whites, only 30% of black adults own guns, compared to 43% of whites. Thus the question, especially at the state level, is whether abortions should be funded by taxpayer dollars. The pro-choice answer here is the Republican one: "no." Many people believe abortion is wrong. Such people should not be forced to pay for other people's abortions. P.S Because I study political theory, so I can't resist one last bad joke: how can we think that reasonable people will come to agreement on the principles of justice if even the Rawls' family couldn't? perma link |
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