One of the major benefits of being done with lawschool and the bar exam is that I finally get to read — not what I HAVE to read — but what I WANT to read.  This disconnect has been going on for so long now that I have (literally) 10 books in a stack just waiting for me to read.

The first of these books is called “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” by Thomas Sowell.  Described by David Mammet (screenwriter, playright, director) as “Our greatest living philosopher”, Sowell certainly challenges all who read him and is exacerbates those who don’t.  His book explores the causes of (and failures that result from) a vision of justice held by many on the left — a vision dominated by what Sowell refers to as a pursuit “cosmic” (as opposed to traditional)  justice.  Cosmic, in this instance, refers to a desire to rectify inherent or “natural” inequalities. Sowell puts it this way:

Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic injustice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured.

For Sowell, these inequalities are not necessarily desirable, but are realities caused by far more complicated circumstances than any politician can fully understand — or fully prepare for.  Sowell points to scores of examples including welfare, poverty, usually made worse by the policies of the self-appointed elite.

We must begin with the universe that we are born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end.  We cannot simply “do something” whenever we are morally indignant, while distaining to consider the costs entailed…

What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost– whether economic, psychic, or other–on an innocent person?  And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?

As soon as one starts asking whether the costs to one segment of society outweigh the costs to another segment, the process of creating “cosmic justice” becomes nothing more than a crude balancing of the equities, a fight for federal dollars — a corrupting process that almost never provides real relief.  In fact, the pursuit of social justice is not necessarily even an appropriate term:

In pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice is not a learned treatice by any stretch of the imagination, it is in many ways a series of simple explanations about why social justice fails… and how we should approach issues of inequity instead of an analysis OF inequity.  Even so, I think what is so important about the book is the categorical framework Sowell suggests: Social justice is really anti-social justice, cosmic justice has nothing to do with “justice” at all but is instead the re-distribution of wealth to fix natural inequalities.  Conservative need to start approaching the world through the filter of these concepts… and hopefully we will convince others to do the same.