Anti-social behaviour

I am very pleased that I had the opportunity to meet F A Hayek a couple of times. On of his many insights was that the concept of "social justice" is essentially meaningless:

Reason: Well, then, why isn't there any such thing as social justice?

Hayek: Because justice refers to rules of individual conduct. And no rules of the conduct of individuals can have the effect that the good things of life are distributed in a particular manner. No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about.

Now, we do complain that God has been unjust when one family has suffered many deaths and another family has all of its children grow up safely. But we know we can't take that seriously. We don't mean that anybody has been unjust.

In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And 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.

How sad it is to read about this misguided event:

SCOTLAND’S GROWING social enterprise sector held its first national trade fair in Perth yesterday.

We are told that:

Social enterprise is a growing part of Scotland’s business mix

That's unfortunate then. A proper business exists to provide its services in the marketplace and makes a profit if it succeeds in that aim. There's nothing at all wrong with businesses that are cooperatives and don't have non-employee shareholders provided that those organisations exist in the free market. As I suspected, the organisation behind this fair doesn't support that kind of enterprise. They claim that they want "social" enterprises to be "Competing on a level playing field to deliver public services across Scotland".

And here's how that is to be achieved:

The Scottish Executive should:

* Support the development of social enterprise through continued, significant and long-term investment in Futurebuilders Scotland

* Recognise and take action to address the distinct needs of social enterprise within the wider social economy

* Work with finance institutions to develop forms of finance which meet the needs of emerging and existing social enterprises

* Play a lead role in putting social enterprise at the heart of social and economic policy across Scotland

Scotland's local authorities and other public agencies should set targets for social enterprises winning procurement contracts, and take all necessary action to meet these targets.

Scotland's economic development and regeneration agencies should put social enterprise at the heart of their policies and practice and take positive action to support the development of social enterprise.

The voluntary sector should recognise and work with social enterprise as a partner in its work to meet social need and develop the social economy.

The private sector should explore how it can work with social enterprise to deliver responsible and sustainable business growth.

In other words this whole boondoggle is about spending taxpayers' money on politically correct non-businesses that can't exist fair and square in the marketplace. Scotland's problem is that politicians of all parties refuse to speak out in favour of the real businesses that are forced to pay for their "social" competitors.

Hayek was right. When we abandon the market and turn instead to the incoherent ideas of social justice and social enterprise the ultimate outcome will be "the complete abolition of personal liberty".