The Quest for Cosmic Justice

Rating:
Summary: A good summary of a misguided ideology
Review: Thomas Sowell's "The Quest For Cosmic Justice" is a stab in the heart of left-wing politics. Early in his book, the author makes a clear distinction between traditional ideas of justice and what Mr. Sowell describes as "cosmic justice." Traditional justice is process-oriented. Everyone plays by the same rules and is judged by the same standards. It is a system that "flesh and bone" human beings can live under. Cosmic justice, on the other hand, means providing everyone with equal prospects of success. This concept of "fairness," as morally spurious as it is, becomes outright dangerous when it requires third parties to wield arbitrary power to override rules and control outcomes. These third parties - found in government, universities, the media, and the courts - see a nation desperately in need of cosmic justice. The gap between the rich and poor is supposedly growing, threatening our economic future. The so-called "earnings gap" between men and women is supposedly the child of a sexist society. Police brutality is becoming a high-tech version of lynching. And so on. Of course, many of these "problems" disappear when confronted with real-world experience and statistical evidence. Creating government "solutions" to these "problems" only entrusts more and more power in the hands of people further and further removed from the real world. To allow any government authority to determine how much money you receive for your work is not only a distortion of the economic process but is a dehumanizing attempt in reducing everyone to political clients. Government price controls on food, supposed to help the poor, have led to widespread hunger in countries around the world. Undermining law enforcement because of its perceived unfairness to minorities have led to high crime rates which hurt minorities most of all. The passion for equality - which somehow became twisted into racial preferences - has led to a divorce of performance and reward, which is to say a divorce between incentive and behavior - perhaps the most crucial foundation of Western civilization. Yet theories of cosmic justice and the public policy that springs from them are unlikely to be re-examined. Why should they be re-examined when they permit its advocates to feel morally superior to everyone else? Meanwhile, those who believe in systematic processes - the marketplace, traditional values, constitutional law (namely, most Americans) are suspected. Mr. Sowell's book is an excellent indictment of "cosmic justice" and an excellent defense of traditional ideas of process and the rule of law. Unfortunately, those who should read this book most will probably read it least.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing to the Beginner in Economics
Review: Those familiar with some philosophy and knowledgeable to economics will enjoy this book. This book I found, not only interesting explores the concept of 'justice' as we see it and 'justice' as it is.
Economic theory is very omnipresent in this work, but more than creating his own economic theorems, Sowell goes out and obliterates every factual basis for economic leftism, totally proving it doesn't work.
All in all, the book is good for everyone except the novice to politics, who probably won't understand some of the bigger pictures involved.