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In the Constitution, equality was not equated with justice. The framers believed that justice exists when all interactions among people are based on voluntary exchange. To them, it was the process of interactions, not the outcomes, which mattered. Today, however, a new idea of justice (often called social justice) equates justice with equality. This view is used to call for a process of enforced equalization and to make envy an acceptable emotion. Under this new concept of justice, an individual is free to exercise his rights as long as such exercise does not violate state-created superior or equal rights of others or the common good as defined by the state. The demand for equality, if fully recognized and implemented, would mean the end of a free society and would result in treating people unequally because the state would have to treat individuals differently in order to make up for their excess or deficiency of ability, motivation, and other attributes. The notion of social justice is used to foster social reform through state intervention and economic planning, devices which require the sacrifice of the moral ideas of individual freedom, individual responsibility, and voluntary cooperation.

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice, during the past three decades, has been proposed by Harvard professor John Rawls. In lieu of the concept of the state of nature, Rawls introduced the methodological concept of an “original position,” a hypothetical and counterfactual condition which requires us to visualize the negotiators of the basic terms of political association conducting their negotiations behind a “veil of ignorance” while having no knowledge of their individual life conditions, including their talents, intelligence, sex, race, class, religion, wealth, conception of the good, etc. Rawls’ veil of ignorance blinds those in the original position to all the specific natural contingencies and social accidents that make up their particular...