Will Wilkinson makes the case that "Social justice" movements, like welfare programs, are the dues a prosperous nation pays for economic freedom.
The "Great Enrichment" of the US and western Europe has been remarkable. With luck, it will spread. From The Great Enrichment and Social Justice:
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, the 20th century’s most influential text on the nature of social justice, was controversial on the left because it provided a supply-side argument against the assumption that socialist equality was the end-all-be-all of distributive justice. Rawls recognized that incentives to production have something to do with levels of consumption and argued persuasively that unequal shares are justified if they leave society’s least advantaged as well off they can be. For many socialists, admitting that justice can possibly admit of unequal shares gives away the store. Rawls sold them out.
Yet Rawls himself, like many other mid-century social democrats, had an uneasy attitude toward enrichment, and tended not to see much to admire in the human motives or legal rights that tend to produce it. Rawls was a liberal who saw society in liberal terms as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” but there was in Rawls’ theory very little appreciation of the possibility that liberal rights and economic growth might need each other. Indeed, he thought that, after a certain modest level of material comfort had been achieved, a regime of fair cooperation founded on liberal rights would do better—and would still be the most desirable of all regimes—without any growth at all. ..
There are endless, interesting debates to be had on this topic. From my standpoint, I like spare cash but value freedom over wealth. However, the core of freedom is private property. My vote is important in theory but trivial in effect.
