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Economics is the. art of allocating scarce goods among competing demands. The conceit of Marxism was the thought that in Communism, economics would be "abolished"; this was why one did not have to think about the questions of relative privilege and social justice. But the point is that we still have to think in terms of economics, and probably always will. The question, then, is whether we can arrive at a set of normative rules which seek to protect liberty, reward achievement, and enhance the social good, within the constraints of "economics." In these essays, I propose the idea of a public household not a third sector alongside the domestic household and the market economy, but one which embraces the two and seeks to utilize market mechanisms where possible, yet within the explicit framework of social goals. It is a liberal conception because of the belief that the individual should be the primary unit of civil society, and that individual achievement should have a just reward. But what I seek to do is to detach political liberalism from bourgeois society. Historically, the two are associated in origin, yet the one is not dependent on the other. In fact, political liberalism as a philosophy has suffered because it has been used to justify the unrestrained claims of private economic appetite. The problem for the Public Household is how to adjudicate the claims of group versus group, where the problem is clearly right versus right, rather than right or wrong; of weighing the claims of group memberships against individual rights; of balancing liberty and equality, equity and efficiency. The starting point, I believe, has to be a recognition of the public character of resources and needs (not wants), and the principle of relevant differences in deciding the justice of various claims. These are the intentions of the major essay in the section on the polity. |
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