Social Justice Fallacies
by Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 2023; 224 pp.

Thomas Sowell has given us a penetrating criticism of the approach to justice taken by many political philosophers, especially John Rawls and his innumerable followers. He says that they construct an image of the way society ought to be but fail to ask whether their plans are feasible. His criticism is well-taken, although he does not offer an adequate account of the rights that people have.

He says about Rawls:

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) consists of 12 subindices, which are weighted according to their shares in total household expenditures. If, for example, food and non-alcoholic beverages (subindex 1) account for 15% of expenditures, they should also be given a weight of 15% in the overall index. In this way, each expenditure category would be given the importance it has for an average household. This is the claim of official statistics. But here, too, as so often, aspiration and reality diverge.

Abstract: Counts of publications in the academic journals of the Austrian school of economics are used to rank scholars and institutions by research productivity in Austrian economics over the preceding decade. The journals surveyed are, alphabetically, Advances in Austrian Economics, Cosmos + Taxis, the Journal des économistes et des études humaines, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and the Review of Austrian Economics.

Pay equity policies lack fundamental justification as public policies.

“I am feeling very good about that prediction,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Bloomberg when asked whether the U.S. would avoid a recession while still containing inflation. “I think you’d have to say we’re on a path that looks exactly like that.”

Late last month, the administrators at a Colorado public school—with the grandiose name “the Vanguard School”—tried to force a 12-year-old boy named Jaiden to remove a Gadsden flag patch from his backpack. The Gadsden flag may be more familiar to readers as simply the rattlesnake flag with the words “don’t tread on me” on it.