Politics- Fairness

 From The Guardian, Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler review – the road to fairness, picking up on John Rawls' ideas:

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls invited us to imagine what a just society would look like by means of an elegant thought experiment. Suppose, Rawls suggested, that we are all behind what he calls a “veil of ignorance”, with knowledge of our talents, income and wealth, as well as our core values, temporarily erased. In this “original position”, what principles of justice would we agree to be bound by? What kind of social contract would we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a good one? Rawls argued that we would choose a set of basic liberties necessary for flourishing, including freedom of expression and of conscience, and a free choice of occupation.

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That wishlist includes a universal basic income sufficient to eliminate poverty (costing about 25% of GDP) awarded to everyone irrespective of wealth, any other income, or whether they’re employed; tertiary education funded by a mix of free tuition and income-contingent loans, and a transfer of wealth to every citizen when they reach adulthood (a reform historically endorsed by the two Thomases, Paine and Piketty, and similar to Gordon Brown’s child trust fund).

I found Chandler’s suggestions inspiring, not least his call for the abolition of private schools. But surely that measure contradicts the freedom of people to spend their money as they wish? Rawls’s basic liberties, Chandler writes, are necessary preconditions to fairness and so take precedence over equality of opportunity. “But,” he argues, “the freedom to spend large amounts of money on a private education, or indeed to pass on unlimited amounts of wealth through gifts and inheritances, simply doesn’t have the same importance.”

Complicated, but what we have been doing is likely to turn us into serfs, if not kill us.

sch 4/22