Fairness, Justice, and the Public Interest

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial…The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What is in the public interest? This seems to be at the heart of the debate over the Health Care Bill (H.R. 3200) . The public interest refers to the common well-being or general welfare, and is central to policy debates, politics, democracy and the nature of government itself. While nearly everyone claims that aiding the common well-being or general welfare is positive, there is little, if any, consensus on what exactly constitutes the public interest. The Health Care Bill (H.R. 3200) explains that the interests, or rights, of all of the people in our society should be paramount. Is it reasonable to assume you can please everyone all of the time? And what are the costs and what are the benefits to individual liberties when trying to enforce a health care bill?

In his A Theory of Justice, John Rawls used a social contract argument to show that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness: an impartial distribution of goods. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. In other words justice is a form of fairness which provides basic liberties to individuals.

Rawls’ principle requires stringent protections for certain specific liberties. He states, “Fairness is justice, and justice must not be stifled or rejected.”
Can we look at justice in terms of the Health Care Bill? Will tighter restrictions lower the costs of health care and provide medical treatment for everyone whether they want it or not, and at what cost to individual liberty? There is disagreement from economists and political scientists over whether government intervention is actually in the public interest.

Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek said, in an interview with Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute, in June of 1992, “…the idea that things ought to be designed in a “just” manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.”

Philosopher Thomas Nagel stated that, “the range of posibilities or likely courses of life that are open to a given individual are limited to a considerable extent by his birth…his genetic endowment.” He continues, “There is nothing wrong with the State tinkering with that distribution when attempting to equalize benefits to individuals.”

Thomas Sowell explains, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, that the “tinkering” mentioned by Nagel in the name of social justice is actually going beyond a social justice and attempting to produce a justice for the Cosmos, which cannot be achieved. Sowell and Hayek would probably agree with critics of the any health care reform bill that the current evolution of the health care system in the U.S. has already allowed the ‘invisible hand’ phenomenon to work in the marketplace of medical treatment, creating the finest medical care in the world, something to be thankful for not ‘overhauled’ for the purposes of giving government even more control over our lives.