As Rights Expand Equality Declines

Two distinct discussions are required to make sense of this De-coupling of Rights from Equality. On the one hand, there has been an employer counteroffensive, still in process, against the economic well-being and conditions of work of their employees. And, on the other there is the perennial bias of Natural Rights philosophy to overlook issues of social and especially economic equality. Here the chapter develops the remarkably similar views of the arch-conservative, James Buchanan and the equally arch-liberal John Rawls on the primacy of private property in a socially constructed world. In that otherwise so attractive Natural Rights scheme of things, it appears that Liberty must always outweigh Equality.