The alternative may be good, but it’s infeasible – the plan’s material change is a pre-requisite to altering the global state of affairs. Redistribution turns the critique by twisting our current capitalistic structure into a utopian ideal of solidarity.

So, is capitalism justified? Of course not—but it can be. Of course not, because although optimal capitalism can reasonably be expected to be superior, in terms of real-freedom-for-all, to optimal socialism, most variants of capitalism cannot, and many of them are blatantly far worse than optimal socialism would be. But capitalism can be justified, providing its tremendous productive potential is appropriately constrained and used in the service of real- freedom-for-all. However, some of what has just been said in the previous section contains worrying suggestions about what this is likely to lead to in the sort of world-wide market economy in which we now live. To spell this out, let us consider the right-wing use to which John Rawls's theory of justice is beginning to be put, as an ideological justification, not of further progress beyond advanced welfare state capitalism, but of a dramatic regression below it. What is the reasoning? Rawls proposes, roughly, that one should maximin socio-economic advantages subject to the respect of fundamental liberties. On what scale? Not on a world scale, but (at most) at the level of each particular well-ordered society. 65 In the sort of world sketched above, each country's independent pursuit of justice so conceived will tend to degenerate into a mad rush for competitiveness, as even the maintenance of current types and levels of welfare state provisions is threatened by an ever-fiercer competition for scarce factors of production and market shares. Rawls’s justice as fairness, the concern for the fate of the worst off subject to the respect of fundamental liberties, would then justify ever-growing levels of inequality on the plausible factual assumption that, in this context, attempting to reduce them in order to improve the situation of the least-advantaged would have a long- term negative impact on the latter. This is the contemporary version of Anatole France's (1907: 83 –4) Penguins Island argument: what the public interest demands, said the spokesman of the island's wealthy farmers to the assembled people, ‘is that little should be asked from those who possess a lot; for otherwise the rich would be less rich and the poor would be poorer. The poor live off the wealth of the rich; this is why this wealth is sacred. Don’t touch it, it would be gratuitous wickedness. Taking from the rich would not do you much good, for there are not many of them; and instead it would deprive you of all resources by thrusting the country into poverty.’66 True, real-libertarianism differs from justice as fairness. But the formal-freedom-constrained leximinning of opportunities is sufficiently close to the fundamental-liberties-constrained maximinning of socio-economic advantages for it to raise strictly analogous worries. Far from replacing the welfare state's stingy and imprisoning means-tested benefits by a generous and liberating citizens' income, one will have the greatest difficulty in maintaining even only the targeted transfers required by undominated diversity. As the world market strengthens its grip, one seems to be facing ever-worse prospects for making any moral progress as measured by real-libertarian standards and heading instead for an ethical disaster as our species is whirled into the next millennium by anonymous forces totally insensitive to the imperatives of justice. Can this scenario be avoided? Can real-libertarianism be prevented from degenerating, along with Penguins Island Rawlsianism, into an ethical justification of the demise of the welfare state? I believe it can, providing it is supplemented by some combination of two strategies.

First, we must fully recognize the crucially important difference between a universal local leximin (or maximin) and a global one, between a leximin that applies to each country of the world taken separately and one that applies to the world as a whole. And having recognized the difference between the two interpretations, we must unambiguously opt for the latter. When speaking of real-freedom-for-all we must mean it: for all. In other words, we must pursue the objective of introducing substantial redistributive mechanisms on a world scale, indeed ultimately an individual basic income at the highest sustainable level for each human being. If only for pedestrian technical reasons —the unavailability of suitable computerized payment systems except in a small number of countries—this ideal is, of course, still far off the political agenda. 67 But it should not be dismissed too lightly as a wild utopia. Not only will disillusionment with both conventional aid and neo-liberal development policies slowly drive those who mean business about helping the poorest of the planet to consider policy packages that include the direct, permanent, and unconditional transfer of purchasing power. But several powerful trends converge to create pressures that could only be alleviated through substantial transnational redistribution. The nations of the world cannot but increasingly realize that they are subjected to the vagaries of the same markets, both for the factors they need to buy and for the products they need to sell. Moreover, they cannot but realize ever more vividly that they are polluting the same air and the same water and that their territories are vulnerable to immigration by the same world population. World pollution will not be kept at a tolerable level without systematic redistribution from the high polluters to the low polluters. Nor will one be able to contain the cost of defending the borders of the affluent world against the influx of economic refugees—and the cost of digesting the fraction that got through into the domestic population—without transnational redistributive policies that significantly and permanently reduce the pressure to migrate.

These pressures, of course, will not smoothly yield leximin real freedom on a world scale. The political feasibility of significant moves in this direction hinges, first, on the spreading of attitudes of tolerance and solidarity across national boundaries. If such attitudes are not widely shared, there is no hope that a conception of justice that embodies both equal respect and equal concern could ever shape future institutions on this scale. The role of the media is crucial in this process. So is that of many transnational non-governmental organizations, from Amnesty International and Greenpeace to religious organizations and movements, large and small, with a widely scattered following. The political feasibility of justice as equal respect and concern, however, is not only a matter of sufficiently widespread emotional adhesion, but also of institutional design. In this respect, there is a world of difference between institutions that amount to mutually advantageous bargaining between nations and institutions that approximate one-man-one- vote democracy on a world scale. Even though the former are, of course, better than settlement by war or the breakdown of co-operation, only the latter hold the promise of making fast progress towards strongly redistributive structures, while at the same time making their own contribution to the required emotional adhesion. Needless to say, such world democracy need not encompass all subject-matters. It is fully compatible with so-called subsidiarity, understood as the maximal decentralization of decision-making the subject-matter allows—which is often far greater than the one currently prevailing. But it will need to have a strong hold not only over fundamental liberties, the rules of international trade, and global environmental problems, but also over basic redistributive mechanisms. Such centralization would not be a damaging intrusion into the autonomy of particular political communities, but a necessary condition for protecting the latter's real freedom to make choices, in particular the choice of granting each of its members considerable real freedom, instead of being ruled by the iron laws of competitiveness.

World democracy, thus limited and instrumentally justified, is no doubt still very remote. But its idea can and should guide and motivate more modest moves, not only when designing world-wide institutions with more narrowly specified competences, but above all when designing transnational institutions on a regional scale. In order to prevent the competitive dismantling of the welfare states, it is, of course, sheer common sense not to wait for world democracy, or even any form of more limited world government, to be possible. Building larger democratic political communities, such as the European Union, is one significant way in which competitive pressures can be attenuated, and thus more leeway gained for the pursuit of the greatest real freedom for all, and at the same time an unprecedented opportunity for proving that massive and permanent interpersonal transfers across the boundaries of largely autonomous nations is not a mere pipe-dream. But then at this level too, institutional design is of crucial importance: there is far more to expect, in a real-libertarian perspective, from a powerful parliament working under the majority rule than from a powerful council of ministers whose decisions require unanimity. Transnational democracy, not international bargaining is the institutional tool for real-freedom-for-all.68

Thus roughly sketched, democratic scale-lifting is the first strategy that must be adopted both in order to protect and regain the fast-shrinking leeway for intranational redistribution and for its own sake, as there is no morally non- arbitrary boundary to our equal concern, save the limits of mankind itself.69 This strategy is essential and urgent, but it will take a long time to create political entities of the right sort at the right level, to equip them with appropriate democratic institutions and to build both the political will and the concrete instruments without which substantial international redistribution will remain a utopia. But we cannot wait that long. The competitive pressure against existing intranational redistribution is mounting, and it would, therefore, be good if there were another strategy which would enable us to keep and regain at least part of the required leeway. I believe there is one, to some extent in tension with the first strategy but none the less usable in connection with it: solidaristic patriotism. Whether or not there exists some institutionalized solidarity on a world scale, there will be pressures on a political entity that aims for a level of internal solidarity more generous than the one that connects it to the surrounding environment, as its citizens will want to purchase from abroad goods whose price is less inflated by the weight of redistribution, and as the net contributors to its redistributive system may want to move the precious factors they control elsewhere in order to earn a higher net income. Now, to some extent, this problem might be handled by imposing social tariffs, which would cancel the advantage some countries derive from lower social protection, thereby making their products less competitive and consequently reducing their attractiveness to capital and skilled labour. But this raises considerable practical difficulties, if only because of the intrinsic contestability of any criterion for establishing such tariffs and the resulting risk of retaliatory moves and mutually detrimental protectionism. So, if the members of the high-solidarity entity considered are moved by purely opportunistic motives, this high solidarity will be under strong pressure, especially as a combination of technological and market-structure factors tend to concentrate an increasing proportion of pre-tax earnings in the pockets of a small proportion of the working population. 70 This pressure would be greatly alleviated, however, if one could bank on a strong commitment to the underlying solidaristic conception of justice on the part of those who are enabled by their skills and other assets to be net contributors. Pride in the collective project in which they are thereby involved would prevent them from being on the look-out for more lucrative prospects abroad or simply for the many loopholes that would enable them to avoid taxation on a significant fraction of their actual income. Consequently it would provide a sturdy protection against competitive downward levelling and a firm basis for the viability of high solidarity on a local level long before it becomes possible on a global level.

Solidaristic patriotism in this sense71 is as absent from Rawls's own explicit vision as is democratic scale-lifting. In a well-ordered society, he asserts, there is a natural duty not to cheat the institutions that embody the shared conception of justice. So, tax-payers should not subvert the maximin redistributive set-up by evading in their private behaviour the taxes they have consented to at the political level. But then should there not also be a natural duty not to subvert the same set-up by opportunistically taking advantage of less redistributive regimes abroad? 72 Whatever Rawls should answer to this question, it is clear to me that if Rawlsianism is not to reduce to a rejuvenated Penguins Island discourse and if real-libertarianism is not similarly to degenerate into an ideological justification of the dismantling of the welfare state, room should be made, along with energetic scale-lifting, for such a patriotic strategy. Utopian fantasy once again? One can hardly expect the required dispositions to flourish as a spontaneous expression of universal human nature. They will have to be nurtured, preserved, encouraged, engineered into existence by specific social conditions, specific ways of organizing social life. But these conditions may not be that different from the conditions that are required anyway for the lasting political feasibility of high levels of solidarity. At this level, again, the specific design of democratic political institutions is important, and so is the empathy-enabling role of the media. But to provide the emotional basis for a strong allegiance to high solidarity in both public and private decisions, one most probably needs more, namely various institutions which systematically provide recurrent opportunities for more-than-superficial personal contacts between people from all categories of the same society. Perhaps social life should be so organized, for example, that people of all social groups would have no option but to grow up (if not at home) in the same crèches and the same schools or to be born and die (if not at home) in the same hospitals. Perhaps one should even introduce a compulsory public service whose explicit purpose may be, say, to look after the environment (and thereby to develop a lifelong environmental awareness) but whose most important function would be to erode the barriers that tend to form between social categories and to maintain a sufficient level of social cohesion. 73 Some of these institutions may turn out to be counterproductive, and their actual impact on the political and private commitment to high solidarity must, of course, be evaluated in the light of the most relevant experiments. This indicates none the less how real-libertarianism may be led to advocate in this indirect, instrumental way, institutional restrictions on freedom which it has no way of justifying directly, 74 and how it can thereby consistently take on board at least some of the anti-individualistic concerns commonly associated with contemporary communitarianism. It also illustrates how a concern with maximin or leximin need not take either political feasibility or individual motivation as given but can and should inspire attempts to shape institutions in such a way that they do not erode but promote the emotional basis of equal concern.