Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

Author:Thomas Sowell [Sowell, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2023-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Only when he can support himself and his family, choose his job and make a living wage can an individual and his family exercise real freedom. Otherwise he is a servant to survival without the means to do what he wants to do.95

Some years later, a book by two Yale professors— Politics, Economics, and Welfare— likewise defined freedom in terms of things received, rather than autonomy preserved. As they expressed it, “we shall try to unravel some of the complexities in the theory and practice of freedom.”96 Their conception of freedom was “the absence of obstacles to the realisation of desires.”97 The “complexities” of this Wilsonian definition of freedom are certainly understandable, since evading the obvious can become very complex. When Spartacus led an uprising of slaves, back in the days of the Roman Empire, he was not doing it to get welfare state benefits.

The more sophisticated or “complex” redefinition of freedom has continued on into the twenty-first century. The author of a book titled The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality said: “In this book, when I speak of freedom, it is the freedom to live a good life and to do the things that make life worth living. The absence of freedom is poverty, deprivation, and poor health— long the lot of much of humanity, and still the fate of an outrageously high proportion of the world today.”98

Back in the days of the early Progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, John Dewey questioned whether most people even cared much about freedom, in the sense the word meant for centuries before Woodrow Wilson redefined it. Dewey said:

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