KEADILAN SOSIAL DALAM TANTANGAN EKONOMI PASAR. Mencermati Gagasan Keadilan Sosial Hayek

Abstract

Is social justice or economic justice a utopia? This would be one of the questions 
 that anyone might immediately raise as he/she reads Friedrick August von Hayek’s
 position on the idea of social or economic justice. As a classic liberal thinker,
 Hayek believed that the free market is the ideal economic system for it in nature
 promotes freedom and equality in a free and open society. Is Hayek’s defence of
 the free martket economy sufficiently convincing to eliminate any room for social
 or economic justice to take place? There is actually no free market in a pure sense.
 The market is not totally free from selfish interests that might be developed by
 market players themselves in doing business. It is therefore not reasonable to
 see the market as a purely spontaneous and independent entity. And since it 
 is in fact open to selfish interventions, its outcomes may be just or unjust. Free 
 competition, prompted systematically by the free market system, therefore, could
 risk human life. For this reason, state intervention to a certain extent is necessary
 to prevent market competition from endangering citizens’ economic prospects. The
 state’s intervention is important, as it is necessary, to secure social or economic
 justice. Social or economic justice is of course an ideal but not necessarily a utopia
 in a radical sense. Taking the unfortunates’ quality of life as the benchmark in
 designing and enacting economic policies, social or economic justice might be, at
 least partially, realized. John Rawls’ idea of maximin rule or maximin strategy
 can pave the way for the realization of such an ideal that every civilized person or 
 society is essentially craving for.
 
 <b>Kata-kata Kunci:</b> Kebebasan, pasar bebas, katalaksi, spontan,
 impersonal, hukum, keadilan sosial, ekonomi komando, regulasi,
 maximin rule.