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CHALLENGING THE CHALLENGERS: A REVIEW OF SERENA OLSARETTI'S LIBERTY, DESERT AND THE MARKET AND DANIEL ATTAS'S LIBERTY, PROPERTY AND MARKETS
Author(s) -
Sternberg Elaine
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
economic affairs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1468-0270
pISSN - 0265-0665
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0270.2007.00760.x
Subject(s) - libertarianism , entitlement (fair division) , voluntariness , free market , law and economics , property (philosophy) , desert (philosophy) , law , free will , negative liberty , economics , political science , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , politics , mathematical economics
These books attack free markets and libertarianism, alleging that their fundamental assumptions are philosophically indefensible. Olsaretti challenges the thesis that free markets produce distributively just outcomes. At most, however, she shows that limited, desert‐based justifications of free‐market outcomes fail to satisfy her questionable desiderata, and that particular entitlement‐based justifications are inadequately supported when they confound voluntariness and freedom. Attas challenges libertarianism itself, claiming that it is fundamentally wrong, and that libertarian notions of property rights are unsustainable. But he considers only arguments based on defective notions of self‐ownership and confused notions of freedom; other, more robust justifications of liberty and property are ignored. Though both of these books fail to demonstrate the strong conclusions they assert, they highlight the dangers of substituting polemic for philosophy. Free markets, property and liberty need, and deserve, rigorous philosophical defences.