According to Adam Smith, “Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of affluence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Our founding fathers wisely constituted a government designed to provide this modest foundation and little more. Wisely, because government – made up of fallible human beings – is not capable of providing more; and it will fail to provide what it can if it attempts to provide what it cannot.

We know, for example, what justice is: giving to each their due. A free market – that is people buying, selling, and exchanging their own goods and services without coercion and without interference – rewards people for what they produce and thus does a “tolerable” job of providing justice. If government restricts itself to acting against fraud and coercion, and otherwise stays out of the way, justice will be the happy – if only approximate – result.

By contrast, even the deepest thinkers cannot define “social justice” concretely enough to provide a workable procedure for attaining it. Proponents of social justice seek — at a minimum — to compensate the more unfortunate among us for the unfair burdens of chance. But only an omniscient and omnipotent being can hope to weigh each man’s troubles and determine just compensation. And only such a being can divine the penalties that are to be assessed on those more favored. In the end, attempts to implement “social justice” invariably result in injustice, because some are invariably given what is due others. And so we abandon what is possible in trying to achieve the impossible.