The concept of social justice implies that societies can be ranked from least to most moral, implicitly evaluating outcomes rather than processes or institutions. In practice, social justice is inherently Marxian, assuming it is morally preferable for wealth to be allocated in favor of virtuously productive workers, rather than to capitalists, who Marx defines as unproductive, exploitative parasites who contribute nothing to society, unjustly taking the lion’s share of what is produced. This purportedly moral dimension has enabled social justice to outlast other Marxian fallacies, such as as the labor theory of value. …

Social justice is often asserted in terms of positive, as opposed to negative, rights. Negative rights are stated in terms of what others may not interfere with. For example, the right to own property is a negative right, because it is only operative to the extent that others, including the government, are prevented from interfering. Positive rights have become a fixture of progressive political advocacy. It is asserted that we have a right to a minimum income, housing, healthcare, education, etc. All these things have to be provided by others, providing them is not simply a matter of preventing others from interfering with our rights or property, but require compelling employers, landlords, medical practitioners, etc., to deliver what we need or want on demand. In other words, positive rights are the right to enslave others for our purported benefit.

[Exactly. And as F.A. Hayek astutely observed in The Road to Serfdom, as those systems fail from their own internal contradictions, societies that operate on those principles become increasingly authoritarian and brutal in order to “force” the desired outcomes. — Ed]