Economic Justice

Economic Justice

Description

The predecessor to this book, The Rights of Americans: What They Are—What They Should Be, commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil Liberties Union. The prior years had seen an extraordinary expansion in the rights of many Americans traditionally subordinated by law and political practice, notably blacks and other racial minorities, women, and the poor. At the same time, members of and advocates for these groups saw the expansion that had taken place as seriously incomplete and gravely threatened by conservative trends in all three branches of government. The Rights of Americans reflected both of these themes. It stated a bold vision of expanding democracy and equality, captured in essays on “traditional” civil liberties such as the right to protest, associate, and publish, and on new rights related to “the essentials of life” such as housing, welfare, legal services, a habitable environment, and equal opportunities in employment and education. On the other hand, many of the essays acknowledged resistance to both traditional civil liberties and the newer equality rights. As Norman Dorsen put it in his eloquent introduction to the volume, “government at every level attempts to solve serious community and national problems by restricting the rights” of the unpopular. Opposition to, or at least doubts about, rights to economic equality were not confined to the Nixon Administration and its wealthy primary constituency. Many members of "the comfortable middle class" and the “newly secure skilled worker” had “enough of social change and judicial activism.” Today the policies of the Reagan administration and the Ninety-seventh Congress powerfully reject the legitimacy or feasibility of economic equality. Further, many liberals today see concern with economic equality as subordinate to concern with productivity and profits. Within the ACLU there has been ongoing debate as to whether to regard issues of economic justice as equivalent in importance to more traditional civil liberties. As Professor Dorsen noted, the essays on various “essentials of life” were “open to the charge of wandering from the traditionally narrow road of civil liberties to the broad avenues of social justice and economic policy.” He rejected this charge as resting on a “false dichotomy” between liberty and economic justice, observing that the effective exercise of liberty depends upon material resources and a substantial degree of economic and social equality. He said there is no need to “apologize for including among individual rights the enjoyment of minimal economic security.” Indeed, fundamental rights should include such matters as the right to useful work at a decent wage, the right to participate in workplace and community governance, as well as the rights to essential material goods and services explored in the 1971 volume. Civil libertarian ideas embody some of the grandest and most liberating visions of our individual and collective human potentiality. The rights to speak, to dissent, to develop and express independent conscience, to associate with others in communities of mutual concern, to control our bodies, all reflect a vision of ourselves and others as free, self-governing people. Further, these noble concepts about who we are directly support a deep civil libertarian commitment that each person be treated with equal concern and respect. The core social issue of our time is whether liberal civil liberties will serve values of human self-realization, community, and equality or whether these liberal rights will rather legitimate the entrenched power of bureaucratic and market institutions that deny those values. The goal of this essay is to participate in the debate about American social policy and law by focusing on one theme: that economic justice and civil liberties are not only compatible, but mutually reinforcing.

Source Publication

Our Endangered Rights: The ACLU Report on Civil Liberties Today

Source Editors/Authors

Norman Dorsen

Publication Date

1984

Economic Justice

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