The indirection—fiddling instead of solving—is morally indefensible. Fifty years ago the economists Milton Friedman on the right and James Tobin on the left suggested that we give at least the American poor a minimum ine, and stop fiddling with the prices of housing and of bread and the like. It's a good moral idea, which the French have implemented. Poverty (at least State-side) would be alleviated, and markets would be left to do their job of making the social pie as large as possible. Such a separation of a policy about ine from a policy about the market is a standard analytic ploy in economics. Sandel's teacher did not get it across to him.
In high theory the separation of welfare from allocation is called the Hicks-Kaldor Criterion, and is, to put it mildly, not above moral criticism. But to stride past the economic analysis is to ignore the actual moral problem—poverty—and its most direct solution. A New Yorker cartoon back in the 1960s showed a parked bank truck, with the guards handing money to people out of big sacks. Said one onlooker to another, "Well, at last the War on Poverty has gotten under way!" Yes. The parable policy for the $1-a-day wretched of the earth is to allow capitalism to rip, which is what China has been doing since 1978 and India since 1991, with vastly more gain to the poor than from munitarian policies.
andel's superficial philosophy ignores too, a slippery-slope objection to allocating goods outside the price system. If charging tolls on congested highways is "unfair to muters of modest means" (in Sandel's repeated formulation of his First Principle, p. 20), what is to stop us from concluding that charging for bread and housing and clothing and cable TV and Fritos is "unfair"？ Nothing. The unanalyzed dictum that it is "unfair" that I do not have a 100-foot yacht (really, I do find it troubling) would slope down to allocation by state direction for everything. North Korea. One can devise moral dicta to stop the slip down the road to serfdom. But Sandel does not tell his readers what the ccounter-dicta might be. He leaves his class to conclude that unadorned "unfairness" is a moral and political taunt suitable to discussions among grownups.
And Sandel ignores the moral issue of the source of unequal ines, that is, what has famously been called, since Robert Nozick articulated it in 1974, the Wilt Chamberlain Example. Suppose Chamberlain gets from 4 million people who willingly pay 25 cents each to watch him perform hook shots. Wilt ends up a millionaire, able to "afford" a moderately big yacht. If the source of high ines is legitimate—Fred Astaire's feet, Jane Austen's pen—why shouldn't such people have preferred access to goods, even necessities？ Professor Sandel's lectures here summarized give no reply. Indeed, as argued in 1971 by John Rawls (Sandel is well known in philosophical circles for attacking Rawls as insufficient munitarian), if a Carnegie or a Gates innovates in such a way that even the least among us is made better off, then the prices, including the profits that evoked their innovation should be left alone, shouldn't they？ What's the beef？
Or turn to the most fundamental philosophical argument (as against the schoolyard, munitarian argument from "afford") for allowing the price system to get on with the job. It was articulated first in 1962 by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and popularized by Rawls in his book a decade later. Suppose that behind a veil of ignorance of where you or I would end up in some future system of markets and creative destruction, or their munitarian opposites, we are asked to decide what constitution we would agree to. Go ahead, choose: neo-liberal markets or munitarian interventions. Suppose, as in fact happened in Holland and then Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we pretty much agree to the Bourgeois Deal—you let me, a bourgeoise, make a fortune inventing the coffee trade or very cheap steel or a puter operating system, and in the third act of the economic drama I'll make you (all) rich by historical and international standards: $129 a day per person in the United States in 2010 as against $6 a day in the same prices in 1800 and $1.40 a day now in Zimbabwe and less in North Korea. The Deal is not in the first act egalitarian, which is as far as Sandel's economic and philosophical analysis reaches. Yet by the third act it has been powerfully enriching for the poor, satisfying a Buchananite-Rawlsian standard of improving the lot of the worst off. The daily ines per person in the average country that has agreed to the Bourgeois Deal has risen, in real, inflation-corrected terms, from an appalling $3 a day in 1800 (and likewise since the caves) to $100 a day now (thus the UK)—and much higher if one properly allows for the much higher quality since 1800 of travel and medicine and economic analysis.
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