The Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights’ panel discussion on the event of Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday offset “liberaltarian” Brown professor John Tomasi with June Speakman, a Roger Williams professor more inclined to agree with the prefix of the coinage. The panel would have benefited from the inclusion of an unabridged conservative who agreed with its root.
The most interesting idea placed on the Nick-a-Nees table was Tomasi’s hypothesis that free markets can correspond with social justice if we think of the latter concept “in new ways.” The people who developed social justice, he says, just “happened to be all from the left.”
A conservative panelist might have suggested that there’s no “happened to be” about it — that the very concept was designed to supplant the competing idea of charity and free association. Justice is the province of the police and the justice system, and “social justice” inherently suggests that those who hold the political levers can judge and impose their view of a just society on others against their will.
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