diogenes said:
I take that "Well, maybe" to mean "No" you have no alternative suggestions for defining "social justice." If you care to offer something, we can resume the conversation.
You shouldn't, since "well" is just a particle, and "maybe" does not mean "no." More to the point, we were discussing the pitfalls of the currently most widely-held position and why it cannot be correct--i.e. why it
must lead to social injustice. You seem oddly unwilling to continue that discussion. Essentially, you said that if the buyer and seller were both willing, that ought to go a long way toward guaranteeing that the resultant distribution of goods was fair. I responded that this might be so, but we need to hone in on just what "willing" means in this case. This is the point where you seemed to stop wanting to discuss, which again seems very odd.
In the meantime, I think we could build on Adam Smith's notion of the liberal reward of labor as a means to begin thinking about what social justice should entail. Briefly, Smith's idea was that the "masters" (i.e. those who own the means of production) should pay their workers as nearly as possible the wage they would make doing the same labor on their own. Thus, if barrels are selling for $100, and a barrel-maker can make five barrels a day, he ought to be paid as close to $500 per day as possible.
Of course, it is correct that the factory owner risks his capital. He should be entitled to an expectation of profit. I think we should do two things about that: first, limit the expectation of profit to something like 5-8%. Second, provide some mechanism whereby losses are made up by society for the first five years a business is operating. Now, of course, we'd have to be careful about how we'd define and implement both. However, I think the popularity of CDs and T-bills provides plenty of evidence that people with capital would still be willing to invest in businesses carried out under such conditions: low risk, low reward will work if it's the best that one can expect.
We should also overhaul how money works. It appears a fiat currency is really no better than having a gold standard, but for different reasons. Money is supposed to track actual wealth. That is, there should be about as much money in circulation as the sum total value of things-of-value in an economy, plus a little extra (no more than 10% extra). Banks would obviously be structured very differently, as they could no longer just make up money whenever it pleased them to offer a loan. Derivative instruments would have to be outlawed (with an exception, perhaps, for commodity futures). I would propose a currency based on a multi-commodity standard. So, instead of exchanging for gold or silver, the guarantee would be that the money could be exchanged for an equivalent value (determined by supply and demand) of some commodity at the pleasure of the exchange agent (i.e. the treasurer). So if I have a fifty dollar bill, and I go to the window at the dept of the treasury, I might get $50 worth of gold, silver, diamonds, oil, lumber, wool, cotton, wheat, etc. at the pleasure of the person behind the window. Next door would be a multi-commodity exchange, where I could walk my sow (assuming that's what I got) back over and sell her for ~$50, depending on what changed in the exchange rate in the time it took to do the walking.
The major advantage this would have is that it gets rid of the instability of a gold standard, since it's much more difficult to corner the market on so many commodities at once. At the same time, people with money would have a vested interest in keeping that money stable, since they could not guarantee which commodity they might receive in exchange for it. Thus, you wouldn't have someone primarily invested in gold trying to destabilize the fishing market, since they might get just that in return for their money. At the same time, the economy would grow based on the total growth in commodities. We'd be back to rewarding hard work rather than financial engineering.
Finally, I think it would be necessary to overhaul inheritance laws, though that's still something I'm thinking about.
