Daniel Chandler's Rawlsian rubbish

Nick French praises Daniel Chandler's new book in an article for 'Jacobin'. 

Rich democracies around the world are today afflicted by an array of morbid symptoms:

Which is why they should do stupid shit and thus become very poor. 

rampant economic inequality,

because the rich and smart haven't run away as they have in Venezuela 

disaffection with democratic institutions and ruling elites,

But voters can choose to vote for crazy nutters who will destroy the economy 

increasing partisan polarization, a rising tide of authoritarian populism, and an ever more dire climate crisis.

Also, death is occurring. We must abolish death.  

In his new book, Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues that advocates for progressive social change must respond to these crises by offering a coherent, systematic vision of what a just society looks like, and that we can find a framework for such a vision in the political philosophy of John Rawls.

Rawls was a fool. He didn't realize that if we fear that we might be hit by a bus tomorrow and thus become unable to work and earn money, we will join an insurance scheme or else build up prudential savings. We won't agree that Society should first help those who are poorest- even if they are work-shy scroungers- before rewarding effort.  

It is to Chandler’s credit that he appreciates the power and radicalism of Rawls’s theory,

Sadly, it is 'anything goes'. We can say 'Society has to be very unequal otherwise there will be mass starvation and then a foreign invasion'.  

and that he ably defends the philosopher from common misreadings and misplaced objections.

But nobody sensible bothered with Rawls. Society was moving in the opposite direction. Reagan and Thatcher were rising. 'Welfarism' and bleeding heart Liberalism were dismissed as mere virtue signalling.  

Free and Equal effectively argues that, taken seriously, Rawls’s theory of justice would recommend wide-ranging social and economic reforms to rich democracies like the United States and the UK, many of which the Left indeed embrace.

But voters don't embrace the Left or, if they do, very quickly regret having done so.  

But in showing himself to be a faithful disciple of Rawls, Chandler recapitulates an important weakness of the former’s philosophy: failing to grapple adequately with the structural obstacles capitalism imposes to realizing a just society.

These are also the obstacles sensible people place in the way of stupid nutters.  

Justice and the “Original Position”

Free and Equal is half philosophy, half practical political prescription. One of its greatest strengths is its clear exposition and defense of Rawls’s ideas for lay readers, which takes up the first half of the book.

It is warmed up sick from the Seventies. What is odd is that Chandler, a former student of Sen's, doesn't dispose of his objection to Rawls's 'transcendental institutionalism' or 'ideal theory'.  

For the uninitiated: John Rawls set out the main elements of his political philosophy in 1971’s A Theory of Justice, refining and elaborating his view in later works. He held that a just society would respect every citizen as free and equal and treat each person fairly at a fundamental level.

Everybody can claim to do that. Nobody can show they have actually done it.  

Rawls thought we could identify the principles of justice that would govern such a society through the thought experiment of the “original position”: a hypothetical situation in which self-interested individuals attempt to come to an agreement on the principles of justice from behind a “veil of ignorance” — i.e., without any knowledge of what position they would occupy in society, what particular skills or talents they would have, or a conception of the good life.

In other words, if everybody is in the position of a brain damaged child. The problem here is that what you agree to can't bind you because you lack competency. Not knowing who you are is evidence that you are suffering from a severe cognitive deficit. Nothing you sign can be held against you. 

In the original position, Rawls stipulates, people would choose the principles that would best guarantee their ability to form and pursue their own vision of the good.

Most people don't bother with having any such thing. What would be the point? Only some stupid philosophers, following Aristotle, babble on about this. But the Epicurean philosophers of Aristotle's own age laughed at him.  

They would not choose principles that would give them an unfair social position relative to others, which would be irrational behind the veil of ignorance.

It would be perfectly rational to say there should be some rich and happy people if you have a chance to become one of them. Plenty of people buy lottery tickets for this reason. You may say 'I'd rather live in an Arabian Nights world where a beggar might suddenly be appointed Grand Vizier. Indeed, if you want an interesting life you should stipulate for Borges's 'lottery in Babylon'. Rawls is assuming a crude Utility Maximization approach would be ubiquitous. But, because of Knightian Uncertainty, Hedging and Income effects, Tardean mimetics, and concurrency, complexity and computability problems, it would be irrational to behave in that way. In any case, as Harsanyi pointed out, Rawls had made a mathematical error. 

We should prefer to emigrate to a Society where those with superior traits have higher social position because this causes 'Tardean mimetic effects' such that they are imitated and so good traits spread through the population. Equally, we want good Insurance markets because this creates the incentive for actuaries to figure out ways of improving outcomes- e.g. encouraging people to quit smoking by offering non-smokers lower premiums.  

If we do not know what our occupation or race or gender or religion will be, none of us will agree to principles that give, say, bankers, or whites, or men, or Christians, political power or economic opportunities at the expense of people in other groups — for all each of us knows, we are among the less favored.

We agree that smart people with expert knowledge should be in charge of important things. By all means, incentivize them to take those jobs in return for higher economic and social rewards. People want to emigrate to America even if they end up as the least favoured there because they would still have a better standard of living than in a starving shithole country. 

Therefore, we would all agree to principles that treat each person equally and secure everyone’s fundamental interest in pursuing their vision of the good life.

Yet, after the Second World War, people preferred to emigrate to the US rather than the USSR.  

Rawls claims we’d agree to two principles in particular. The first principle says that everyone has “an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.”

A right is only effective if there is an incentive compatible remedy. Who will provide it? Will lawyers work for free to secure the rights of the very poor? Will the Government fill their pockets with cash? Where will that cash come from? If the voters rebel, or the country goes off a fiscal cliff, there will be entitlement collapse. 

There is a philosophical problem with Rawls's principle. It is impredicative. We can't determine what liberties x should have till we have evaluated what everybody could also have. One could arbitrarily say 'such and such 'constitution' is feasible and meets the criteria. The problem is that you can't show this is a unique solution or is the supremum. Thus the principle suffers from the 'intensional fallacy'. Its extension changes as the knowledge base changes but never has a supremum and thus is empty.  

The basic liberties include political freedoms, such as the rights to vote and hold public office,

these are lost if gangsters rule the neighbourhood or a foreign invader seizes territory. Providing a remedy for loss of liberty may itself mean the loss of many basic liberties as people are conscripted into the army. Look at what happened in Ukraine after Putin invaded.  

as well as basic personal liberties like freedom of speech,

A Liberal Government put Bertrand Russell in prison for an article he had written during the Great War.  

freedom of movement, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure.

But, under exigent circumstances, all these things can be done under due process.  

The second principle says that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged

again there is a problem of impredicativity here. The benefit of the most advantaged may have to be maximized to do anything at all for the poorest. Moreover, helping them may cause people with high disutility from work, joining the least advantaged group. 

There is no unique or robust 'extension' for the intension 'least advantaged'

and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”

I should have the right to become the son of a billionaire or the wife of a movie star. Also, I should get to combine the offices of Pope and Chief Rabbi.  

Fair equality of opportunity means that society must strive, through generous provision of public education as well as formal antidiscrimination protections, to provide everyone, regardless of accidents of birth, equal opportunities at attaining different jobs and public offices.

Very true. Why did Terence Tao get so many years of advanced education in mathematics? How come I was chucked out of Collidge for failing to count past 69? 

And insofar as different positions reward their holders with differential income, power, or social status, those inequalities must be to the benefit of the least advantaged.

It may the least advantaged belong to incestuous cannibal lineages. Every CEO or Brain Surgeon should let them bite off pieces of their anatomy.  

Perhaps some occupations need to be more highly compensated, either to attract individuals with rare skills or to make especially unpleasant or dangerous work more enticing for prospective hires; but these differences are only justified insofar as they improve the quality of life of citizens in lower-paid work.

When hiring an expert we can't be sure he will be able to benefit us. We are taking a chance. Similarly, we can't establish how third parties will be affected. If 'justifications' are needed for every hiring decision involving high salary packages, innovation in the economy will grind to a halt.  

A Philosopher of Neoliberalism?

One of the most satisfying aspects of Free and Equal is its efficient dismantling of common but misguided objections to Rawls’s theory. Chandler argues persuasively that many common criticisms rest on either implausible premises or misunderstandings of Rawls’s framework. It is worth highlighting in particular his lucid response to the communitarian criticism of Rawls, a criticism that has come from both left- and right-leaning corners.

If you didn't know your own ethnicity or religion or what language you speak, you may end up choosing to live in a country where you will be fucking miserable. 

Oikeiosis- belonging- is important and tends to promote utility because there is channelization of preference such that better focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games become available. As Schelling noticed, this can lead to non-coercive segregation or a better menu of 'Tiebout models'. Thus, you have more ability to move to where the local fiscal mix better suits your preferences. If you have young kids you move to where there are good schools. If you are single and want to mingle, you may move downtown where there is a big entertainment district. 

The objection goes something like this: Rawls, like other liberal philosophers, assumes that people are fundamentally egoistic and individualistic, seeking to satisfy their own desires above all else; moreover, we can understand human beings and their desires independently of the historical and social contexts in which they find themselves, including religious and ethnic contexts. These assumptions come out clearly in Rawls’s construction of the original position: the principles of justice would be decided on by self-interested individuals, abstracted away from people’s actual conceptions of the good formed by historically contingent locations in religious, ethnic, or other communities. These assumptions, and the theory of justice that results, communitarians say, encourage excessive individualism and selfishness, which erodes traditional communities, civic life, and social trust.

There could be a Rawlsian 'Tiebout model'- e.g. a district where wealth is shared which 'woke' people can move to. It might be a great place to live.  

But despite the intellectual pedigree of this critique, it is, Chandler notes correctly, based on a simple misunderstanding of Rawls’s ideas. That misunderstanding is due to a misreading of the original position — “a tendency to (mis)interpret the description of the parties in the original position as an account of human psychology or of the metaphysical nature of the self.” But Rawls didn’t intend the original position to depict what people are actually like. It is a thought experiment meant to help “identify basic political principles for a diverse and democratic society”:

In other words, it is a 'Just So' story. Feminists might say 'in the original position, men will vote to ban dicks because most men don't want to be penetrated by a dick. Nor would any sensible woman.' A Gandhian might say 'In the original position everybody would vote for celibacy because sex is yucky. Society brainwashes you into thinking your genitals can give you pleasure. Believe me, you'd be better off without them.'  

In fact, properly understood, the original position embodies almost the opposite of what its critics claim. Far from being grounded in the idea that people are inherently egoistic, it assumes that people are motivated by a desire to live with others on terms that are both mutually beneficial and fair.

What's stopping them from doing so? People are welcome to give away their money and spend their time wiping the bums of homeless people in between sucking them off. If everybody was very nice and just, there would be no need for politics.  

That the parties to the original position are conceived of as self-interested individuals allows us to capture the ideas that each person’s point of view must be considered and that principles of justice must be equally acceptable to everyone.

But 'points of view' are epistemic. If you strip them away, there are no fucking points of view. The fact is, on any political issue, I want to hear from really smart people with a lot of experience and who have 'run the numbers'.  

Likewise, parties being unaware of their conceptions of the good is a way of ensuring that the principles are fair to people with diverse values and attachments, which of course are shaped by their particular social contexts, and which might be central and inalienable parts of their personalities.

But you have thrown away relevant information! It is obvious that some people have a better point of view on Political Economy because of their expert knowledge and mastery of the relevant statistics. 

This point is worth belaboring, because the hyper-individualism lambasted by communitarians is indeed worth criticizing.

IN which case it is also worth persecuting dissidents.  

It is a defining and destructive element of today’s neoliberal political order.

But better than the alternative- look at Venezuela. 

But the fact that the communitarian critique misfires against Rawls indicates that he was not, after all, providing ideological cover for neoliberalism. Chandler is in fact justified in looking to Rawls’s ideas for a radical alternative to neoliberal orthodoxy.

The only justification for looking at a person's ideas is if they are smart. Rawls' wasn't smart.  

Rawls vs. Socialism?

Chandler is also on solid ground when he disputes the idea that Rawls’s principles were merely a complacent defense of the mid-century welfare state or even a justification of the “trickle-down” policies popularized during the Reagan-Thatcher era.

Students listening to Rawls's ideas decided that 'Liberalism' had shat the bed. As Reagan said 'the L-word' would not dare to speak its own name for very shame.  

Realization of the social and economic equality called for by the two principles would require a redistribution of wealth and power more extensive than even those achieved by the Scandinavian social democracies at their height.

It resulted in stagflation. There was 'Corporate welfare'- i.e. the workers' pockets were picked through taxation to pay the employers to pay them. Suddenly, everybody turned against both the 'Welfare Queen' and the CEO who kept begging for more money from the tax-payer so as to continue to featherbed his employees while the Japanese grabbed market share.  

Much less convincing is Chandler’s response to the socialist critique of Rawls.

Says a Socialist.  

Rawls himself held that an ideally just society might be socialist but might not be; he argued that justice was in principle also compatible with a form of capitalism he called “property-owning democracy,” in which private ownership of the means of production was permitted but heavily regulated to prevent large concentrations of wealth and political power. There is now a literature arguing that Rawls’s principles commit him to being a socialist, while others argue that he should have been a principled defender of capitalism.

Rawls's principles were anything goes. The fact is, if you were free of Society's brain-washing, you would see that only the rule of the Grand Pooh-Bah can bring the power of levitation to the masses. Also, cats should be banned. They are projecting mind-rays which cause me to have sex with my vacuum cleaner which totes voids the manufacturer's warranty. 

Free and Equal seems to come down on the latter side of the debate: Chandler argues that a capitalist society need not be unjust, and he ends up making practical recommendations for redistributing wealth and expanding workplace democracy that would largely leave ownership of society’s resources in private hands.

These are foolish recommendations- e.g. Gordon Brown's 'child trust fund' scheme- though some degree of 'workplace democracy' may be implemented by certain organizations to raise efficiency and improve information aggregation.  

One central argument for the injustice of capitalism, of course, is that capitalism is inherently exploitative.

Only if elasticity of Demand or Supply is low. Raise elasticity and there can be no confiscation of 'rent'. But raising elasticity improves allocative efficiency. It is good in itself. However, this may mean banning immigration.  

Because capitalists have a monopoly over the resources needed to produce goods and services, workers must hire themselves out for a wage if they don’t want to starve;

unless there is a 'basic income' scheme 

the capitalists then sell what their employees produce on the market and pocket a large share of the products’ value as profit. This “surplus value” that owners extract from workers is the fruit of exploitation.

Raise elasticity of supply- e.g. by giving workers more alternatives- and 'surplus value' disappears. There still will be a reward for risk taking and for combining factors of production. But this is a return on entrepreneurial skill.  

Drawing on arguments from the philosopher Will Kymlicka, Chandler disputes the charge that such exploitation makes capitalism unjust. For one thing, Chandler says, eliminating exploitation wouldn’t necessarily make the economy fair. Even if all firms were collectively owned and workers were paid the full value of the products of their labor, there would still be unfairness due to “unequal opportunities that different workers have to develop their skills” and “the inequalities that inevitably arise in a market economy between, say, low-skilled shop assistants and high-skilled lawyers.”

Or between pretty girls who can get married to rich men and ugly and elderly men like me who have no chance of dating Jeff Bezos.  

But this is clearly a non sequitur. Very few socialists would claim that converting firms to collective ownership (by workers or the state) would be sufficient to achieve economic justice, and socialists have every reason to support a robust system of public education as well as various forms of regulation and solidaristic collective bargaining agreements to equalize job opportunities and flatten income differentials.

Which will flatten incentives. Some will prefer leisure to work. Many will prefer to engage in work-place politics rather than production. You will have a bigger and bigger bureaucracy strangling everything with red-tape.  

But in addition to pursuing policies aimed at equality in market outcomes, socialists challenge the exploitation at the heart of capitalism.

Everybody else challenges the virtue signalling stupidity at the heart of Socialism. Anyway, the biggest problem we face is dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban dicks now! 

Anticipating this response, Chandler offers another interesting objection to the socialist critique of exploitation, one made by G. A. Cohen and others. The extraction of surplus value from workers is not necessarily unjust, the argument goes. For example, some people might build up funds through honest work and saving, and then use that money to start a small business and hire employees. Need this business involve objectionable exploitation of its workers? Or what about people who rely on disability or retirement or unemployment benefits funded by taxes on labor income?

The problem here is that the elasticity of Capital may be high. Try to tax it and it runs away causing employment to fall. You can't extract shit from a mobile factor.  

These examples are supposed to demonstrate that the extraction of surplus value from workers is not necessarily unjust and,

we are welcome to say it is unjust for the same reason we may feel it unfair that we have a smaller dick than average.  

therefore, that capitalist exploitation isn’t either. But this just shows that we need a better account of exploitation and what’s wrong with it. Socialists aren’t committed to the view that any extraction of a surplus from workers is exploitative or unjust. Even in a society where all firms are collectively owned, some of the surplus produced by workers must be reinvested in production or diverted to pay for public education, health care, and the like.

But that reinvestment might be totally shite if the people doing it don't have an incentive to get richer by doing it. Suppose I'm in charge of maintaining the fleet of buses used by the Public Transport authority. I know how this can be done cheaply and effectively. But, if I am constantly being harassed to award the contract to Disabled Lesbian Goats, I might just buckle under and do the 'politically correct' thing. The result is that taking a bus becomes a fucking nightmare.  

What socialists object to is how capitalism allows the ruling class to use its ownership of the means of production to dominate or subordinate the working class, undemocratically deploying their power to force workers to labor for capitalists’ benefit.

Similarly feminists may object to the fact that men have dicks while Muslims may object to the fact that plenty of Kaffirs are rich and happy. God wants them to be miserable so they will learn the error of their ways. There are also some very rich people who scarcely pay any tax themselves who nevertheless picture themselves as shamelessly exploited and abused by peeps wot went to fancy Collidges.  

What’s wrong with capitalist exploitation, in other words, is that it involves capitalists using (illegitimate) social power to extract workers’ labor. The only way to end this form of injustice is some scheme of collective ownership in which decisions about what to produce and how to distribute the social product is determined in a democratic, egalitarian fashion.

But this tends to result in no social product being available. Still, it is true that only by nationalizing and redistributing dicks can those with below average todgers turn into super-studs.  

Go All the Way

Much of the book is devoted to drawing out the practical institutional and policy implications of Rawls’s principles of justice for rich democracies today.

So that they can become dirt poor dictatorships like Venezuela.  

Chandler proposes a laundry list of Rawls-inspired reforms, most of which will be familiar and congenial to liberals and leftists. These include, to name just a few, strict limits on campaign finance and the public funding of political parties;

This should help the far Right.  

breaking up and regulating private media corporations and promoting the growth of publicly funded media sources;

I'd rather have Netflix than pay the BBC's license fee.  

expanding public childcare and education at all levels;

more illiterate people and paedophiles should get jobs in schools 

a universal basic income (UBI); reforms to increase the power of trade unions, such as sectoral bargaining; and various forms of state intervention in the economy to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

If a party with this manifesto looks electable there will be capital flight, a collapse of the real exchange rate such that the terms of trade move against the country (thus it gets less gains from trade) and a sharp fall in National Wealth which in turn means lower per capita Income going forward. There will be an immediate rise in the 'natural' rate of unemployment while skilled workers and highly educated youngsters flee the country. 

What is novel here is less Chandler’s individual prescriptions than his arguing for them as part of a coherent package, as an attempt to realize a Rawlsian vision of a just society.

Strangely, he doesn't seem enamoured with Sen's 'capability' approach probably because even he realizes it is wholly vacuous. Still, by reviving the spectre of Rawls, he reminds older readers of just how fucking awful the Seventies were.  

Free and Equal is thoughtful in evaluating the pros and cons to different potential approaches to making our society fairer for everyone, reviewing empirical arguments for and against some of the more controversial proposals.

Why not make it fairer for productive people? Do piecemeal social engineering so elasticities of Supply and Demand increase. This is 'mechanism design' of a sort used by the private sector. It can also help the public sector. 

Of particular note among the proposals are suggested reforms to expand democracy in the workplace.

If this means more 'Voice' for people who know what the actual problems are then it is perfectly sensible. If it means woke nutters banging on about single sex toilets, then it is highly mischievous.  

Chandler argues that, according to Rawls, not only differences in income and wealth but also differences in power and influence in the workplace must be distributed so as to provide the most benefit to the least-well-off members of society.

Why stop there? Why not also insist that every rich family must adopt as their beloved baby grandson at least one elderly and very poor man?  

To this end, he recommends expanding basic employment protections (like health and safety regulations and minimum entitlements to paid leave and vacation),

more property rights in jobs means more youth unemployment- as in Italy 

German-style comanagement schemes,

which can work if German people are involved.  

corporate profit-sharing and employee share ownership,

which a lot of firms do anyway 

and policies to encourage the formation of worker-owned cooperatives.

again this has been tried but the thing is no panacea.  

Consistent with his rejection of socialism, however, Chandler does not recommend full transformation of the economy to worker or public ownership. Yet he doesn’t offer convincing reasons for stopping short of full-blooded economic democracy, even as Rawls’s principles would seem to point in this direction.

Full blooded economic democracy means everybody, except the thugs in office, starving to death or running away. Even if no legal 'control rights' exist, they can be appropriated illegally.  

Those principles say that inequalities of power as well as wealth must be to the benefit of the less advantaged,

but there is no way of saying if this is genuinely the case or if there is a unique solution to the problem.  

but Chandler does not argue that private ownership of the means of production is more beneficial to workers than some version of collective ownership.

Both may suddenly collapse because they run out of money after having done stupid shit.  

He does, however, recite the familiar arguments for the importance of the efficiency provided by markets as opposed to top-down state planning, which I would not dispute. Markets may be combined with public ownership of firms, though, as Rawls and indeed Chandler himself acknowledge. It is unfortunate, then, that Chandler does not engage with the many proposals for market or quasi–market socialism that have been developed in recent years, which aim to capture the benefits of both collective ownership and market efficiency.

The problem with those proposals is that they don't clarify how control rights can get reassigned. We know that an entrepreneur who runs his company into the ground causing its share-price to collapse can be sacked after it is taken over. We don't know how an enterprise which ignores 'quasi-market' signals can be reconstituted. Suppose, there is a Ministry or a Tribunal in charge of this. Then the enterprise will spend all its time trying to appease the officials involved. This is like 'Regulatory Agency capture'. 

The closest Chandler comes to advocating for socialism is his support for the creation of citizens’ wealth funds, similar to sovereign wealth funds found in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, in which the state would buy up shares in private companies and distribute the earnings to citizens as a UBI.

What about Iceland? It had some very clever economists but they bet on the wrong horse and so the country reneged on its obligations. 

He is careful to refrain from suggesting that such funds should control a majority of society’s wealth, however, and he refers approvingly to Norway’s prohibition on its fund holding more than 10 percent of voting shares in any company. We are not given reasons to prefer this limited role for social wealth funds compared to, say, Sweden’s ill-fated Meidner plan,

Sweden had sensible economists. Rehn, Meidner, Myrdal etc were inflation hawks. However it was Bretton Woods which enabled its initial success. Once the bureaucracy started to expand- between 1960 and 1980, the public sector absorbed 30 percent of the workforce- there was greater and greater cost-push pressure. It may be that something like the Meidner plan could have succeeded if stagflation had not occurred. It is certainly possible for a small, cohesive, country to do sensible things. But that's not what was happening in Sweden. By the Nineties it aggressively pursued free-market reforms and started to grow at a good clip. 

which would have eventually put a majority of the country’s stock market in the hands of worker-owned wage-earner funds.

That's what caused IKEA to flee to Holland. Apparently Ingmar Bergman too ran away from high taxes.  

Property, State, and Utopia

Free and Equal neglects another important argument for the fuller socialization of enterprise. In virtue of their control over investment, capitalists wield outsize power over even democratic states. That is because, first, the state relies on revenue generated by taxes on private economic activity; and second, because elected officials can govern only with some degree of support from the public, who will become unhappy if insufficient investment is happening (i.e., if there is a recession). But whether capitalists engage in sufficient investment to fund the state and maintain popular support for a government depends on the level of “business confidence” — capitalists’ sense that the government is providing a sufficiently friendly environment for accumulation.

Capitalists borrow money from savers- or their Pension funds- so as to set up enterprises. You can take the enterprise but then you get the debts. The Capitalist starts up elsewhere. He can always get finance because of his track-record. But the same is true of skilled and talented people. They can run away taking their skills with them. 'Exit' matters. Socialism requires a big Berlin Wall to prevent the proletariat from fleeing.  

If business confidence dips and capitalists decide to withhold their investment — in other words, go on capital strike — the government may soon find itself insolvent or kicked out of office by an angry electorate (peacefully or otherwise).

The difference between a worker and a capital strike is that workers need to eat. The Capitalist can go start an enterprise elsewhere. The savers who put their money into his enterprise are welcome to try and get their money back from the Government.  

This structural leverage allows capitalists to beat back ambitious reforms that threaten their profits or their control over investment and production. In France, capital strikes helped lead to the failure of socialist Léon Blum’s government in 1937 and to the reversal of François Mitterrand’s ambitious pro-worker program in 1982–83.

The phrase 'capital strike was used about Roosevelt's America in the second half of the Thirties.  

In Chile in the early 1970s, capital strikes eventually led to the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.

But Maduro and Korea's Kim are sitting pretty. Socialism can prevail by killing enough people.  

There is little doubt that many of the reforms advocated by Chandler would face fierce resistance from capitalists, as he acknowledges.

They face fierce resistance from the working class. They don't want their hard earned money going to disabled Lesbian immigrants who look like me.  

And, to be fair, he is explicit in not putting forward a political strategy but rather an “end goal” to strive for.

Why not set up a worker controlled enterprise and show the thing can produce superior outcomes? The fact is, Socialism was attractive when people could say 'In Soviet Russia, everybody is guaranteed a job and public housing and excellent schools for their kids. True, they might not have Coca Cola, but they have kvass which is just as good.' 

Still, it is worth pointing out that capitalists’ control over investment gives them an extremely powerful lever with which to resist or roll back the sorts of policies that Chandler thinks a just society requires.

The bigger problem is that working class people have votes. They won't give them to people endorsed by 'woke' nutters who teach nonsense in some fancy Collidge.  

Once we recognize that power, we should recognize the necessity of taking it from them, by putting control of investment in public hands.

You first have to take power from the hands of the working class voter.  

All that said, the book is a refreshing and useful contribution to envisioning a better world. Chandler is correct that — contrary to the knee-jerk reactions by some on the Left — Rawls’s theory of justice is worth taking seriously, and he pulls off the not insignificant task of making the theory and its implications speak to the practical concerns of political activists and policymakers.

Rawls gives an argument for helping the poor. In essence it is 'imagine you were in the shoes of one of those smelly proles. Wouldn't you want the Government to send some nice lady to wipe your bum and do the washing up?' Sadly, it is a stupid argument. The way to go is to raise elasticities by giving people more and better alternatives.  

By combining systematic moral theory with pragmatic prescriptions for getting us closer to a just society, Free and Equal provides a model for what politically engaged philosophy should look like.

It should look like warmed up sick from the Seventies. To my mind, what 'political philosophers' should do is a careful Hohfeldian analysis of 'Human Rights' such that they can be attached to incentive compatible remedies. Otherwise, voters are turning against the thing. But, they may throw out the baby along with the bathwater.