Market Socialism Is Not Market Capitalism: Remarks on Robin Hahnel's "Economic Justice"

In his recent work, Robin Hahnel defends a monolithic metric of economic desert: to each according to effort or sacrifice. I criticize from an egalitarian standpoint this meritocratic distributive principle on theoretical, practical, and normative grounds. I also question his argument that in market socialism the allocation of labor cannot accommodate an egalitarian distribution of labor income; his not unfamiliar argument rests on a fatal theoretical error that conflates the allocative and distributive functions of market prices. I treat Hahnel's work in the context of larger issues about competing concepts of justice and the distributive institutions that might suit them.