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Social Justice = Sustainability

I am in the middle of a book called The Ecology of Commerce. As the name suggests it is about how a free market could become environmentally restorative. Besides the main theme there are more than a few gems of social justice in there. Here is my favorite:

In reality, we have not one but two welfare systems. The first is meager, consisting of aid to the unemployed, dependent children, the poor and helpless. It is seen as a charity, a hand-out, a grudging acceptance of social responsibility, but it is almost always accompanied by judgement, admonishments of failure, and a high moral tone. The second welfare system is large, expensive, and expansive. It comes in the form of large government grants and programs for building highways, subsidies to the rich in the form of interest payment deductions on their houses, giveaways of timber and mining rights on government lands, government-financed research in universities, revolving door policies between the defense industry and government resulting in expensive, poorly planned procurement policies, and so on.

Hawkins goes on and writes that the top fifth of the population receives three times more housing subsidy then the bottom fifth.