Out of the Mouths of Babes

Nicholas Schulz from the March 1998 issue

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Landsburg performs an important bit of intellectual jujitsu on Rawls. He embraces the philosophical framework Rawls established to ensure a just society. Then, donning his economist's cap, he constructs a model to demonstrate just how unappetizing Rawlsian liberalism would prove in practice.

Among other things, it would surely mean a tax on the arbitrary traits which are reliable indicators of earning power. Since whites on average earn more than blacks, there would be a tax on whiteness. Since men on average earn more than women, and taller people more than shorter, there would be maleness and height levies as well. Rawls's theory might also require subsidies. There is a strong correlation between a person's finding a suitable mate in life and his or her overall happiness. Since physical attractiveness expands the pool of potential mates, a just society would provide tax breaks for good-looking people to mate with ugly ones. These examples suggest that Rawls's neat and tidy scheme is not so neat and tidy after all.

For all its strengths, Fair Play is not without flaws. Many of the book's instructive examples and analogies revolve around Landsburg's daughter. While his obvious devotion to her is touching, it can get a bit tiresome, kind of like being shown too many baby pictures.

Landsburg wears his anti-authori-tarianism like a badge of honor, but his stridency is off-putting at times. The statement "authority is always and everywhere the enemy of freedom" is either an empty tautology or just plain absurd. Landsburg fails to draw an important distinction between public and private authority, thereby neglecting the role of institutions that are critical for a healthy society, such as churches, businesses, and families. He also fails to note the value of a limited government and the rule of law in the preservation of freedom. And while Landsburg is right that the "blind exaltation of government" is dangerous, he gives the reader pause when he says he is inclined to teach the young "that all laws are bad." Likewise when he calls for an attorney general who "believes that bad laws are bad and should be ignored"--a sentiment worthy of Bill Lann Lee.

All in all, Fair Play is a valuable and eminently readable book. Landsburg shakes the reader out of a comfortable complacency and reminds us of the importance and power of culture. A libertarian friend once remarked, "The problem with conservatives is that all they want to do is fight the culture war." To a certain extent he was correct. But the scope of the culture war is not nearly as narrow as either libertarians or conservatives believe. It is a fight over the largely unexamined assumptions that dominate discourse today--not just about marriage, drugs, abortion, and homosexuality but about trade, regulation, affirmative action, judicial activism, immigration, taxes, torts, the environment, and a host of other issues. Enough, it would seem, for a common project between libertarians and conservatives. Fair Play is an important reminder of that.