Property-Owning Democracy and the Priority of Liberty

Abstract

The distinction drawn by Rawls between the ideas of property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism parallels his distinction between justice-based ‘liberalisms of freedom’ (including his own conception of justice as fairness) and utilitarian- based ‘liberalisms of happiness’. In this paper I argue that Rawls’s failure to attach the same level of significance to essential socio-economic rights and liberties as he attached to the traditional liberal civil and political rights and liberties gives justice as fairness a quasi-utilitarian character, which is incompatible with the fundamental objective of protecting the highest.-order interests of citizens conceived as free and equal. I argue that in order fully to protect these interests, rights to access to non-human capital and productive resources should be assigned the same level of significance as that assigned to the civil and political rights and liberties, and prioritized over the lower-order rights and benefits regulated by Rawls’s second principle of justice.

The Hayek–Friedman hypothesis on the press: is there an association between economic freedom and press freedom?

“…Cheibub et al , 2010) to much more maximalist definitions with strong normative components. These definitions include features of political freedom and human rights such as press and media freedom, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, but some maximalist definitions also include a set of specific policies deemed to be normatively desirable as outcomes of democracy as well as the constitutionalization of socio-economic rights (Kerr, 2013; Morlino, 2004; Stilz, 2014).…”

Property-owning democracy, market socialism and workplace democracy

“…Kerr (2013) argues convincingly that welfare state capitalism is even unable to secure equal economic liberty, which is the heart of Thomasi's argument. 4 I will not discuss limitarianism further in this paper as another alternative, because it can be seen as one policy option for property-owning democracy.…”