Classical Liberalism Is Based on Commutative Justice; Social or Distributive Justice Requires Constant and Repeated Coercion to Maintain Equality over Time

The ‘new liberals’, by contrast, think that income redistribution is exactly what governments should do. They see inequality and poverty as the result of unequal power and unjust property laws that benefit employers and the rich but harm employees and the poor. To promote ‘social justice’, therefore, government must correct the power imbalance and redirect wealth and income from better off to worse off people.

Classical liberals think this a gross misuse of the word ‘justice’. To them, justice is commutative justice, the resolution of conflicts between individuals and upholding the rights and freedoms of individuals by punishing those who intrude on them. It is about restraining threats and violence, and granting restitution to people who are made worse off by coercion. It is about the conduct we expect, and have a right to expect, from each other.

Real justice, therefore, focuses solely on how people behave towards each other. Being robbed is unjust; catching flu is a misfortune but it is not unjust, because nobody has acted unjustly. Social or distributive justice, on the other hand, is quite different. It is about the distribution of things between different members of a group. It seeks to alter that distribution – generally towards greater equality
– even if the existing distribution is simply the outcome of events, and nobody has behaved badly or acted unjustly.

If, for example, 100,000 people each pay to watch a popular singer at a stadium, they end the evening slightly poorer and the singer ends it significantly richer. But nobody has done anything wrong, and nobody has been coerced. Classical liberals would therefore ask: how can the resulting distribution of wealth possibly be unjust? And they point out that to return things to equality would require coercion – taking the singer’s new wealth by force in order to return it to the audience. Indeed, as Nozick says, it would require constant and repeated coercion to maintain that equality over the future.

--Eamonn Butler, Classical Liberalism: A Primer (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2015), 54-55.