EclectEcon

One of the papers at the conference I am attending has the phrase "social justice" in the title. Last week, before leaving for the conference, I told my colleagues at The Castle that typically this is just a buzz word/phrase for "condescending paternalistic pinko left-wing elitist interventionism". I'll be very curious to see if the paper fits the mold. I have tight priors that it will.

Here, from an article in the New Criterion about Hayek, is a similar perspective:

Think only of the odious phrase “social justice.” What it means, in practice, is de facto injustice, since it operates by enlisting the legal machinery of justice in order to support certain predetermined ends. Partisans of “social justice” eschew “merely formal” justice; in so doing they replace the rule of law—which was traditionally represented as blind precisely because it was “no respecter of persons”—with the rule of (pseudo) “fairness.”

Let me add that despite his strong criticisms of socialism and big gubmnt, it is not at all clear to me that Hayek was opposed to having some sort of social safety net provided by gubmnt. It seemed to me, though, from what I read by him, that he favoured a much lower social safety net than we now have in either Canada or the US, that he saw the ideal as a bare minimum safety net.
[h/t to BenS]