I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

It is customary nowadays to speak of "social engineering." Like planning, this term is a synonym for dictatorship and totalitarian tyranny. The idea is to treat human beings in the same way in which the engineer treats the stuff out of which he builds bridges, roads, and machines.

Almost every suggested principle of distributive justice is patterned: to each according to his moral merit, or needs, or marginal product, or how hard he tries, or the weighted sum of the foregoing, and so on. The principle of entitlement we have sketched is not patterned...The set of holdings that results when some persons receive their marginal products, others win at gambling, others receive a share of their mate’s income, others receive gifts from foundations, others receive interest on loans, others receive gifts from admirers, others receive returns on investment, others make for themselves much of that they have, others find things, and so on, will not be patterned. Heavy strands of patterns will run through it...Distribution according to benefits to others is a major patterned strand in a free capitalist society...but it is only a strand and does not constitute the whole pattern of a system of entitlements (namely, inheritance, gifts for arbitrary reasons, charity, and so on). Will people tolerate for long a system yielding distributions that they believe are unpatterned? No doubt people will not long accept a distribution they believe is unjust. In a capitalist society...the fabric constituted by the individual transactions and transfers is largely reasonable and intelligible. In stressing the large strand of distribution in accordance with benefit to others, Hayek shows the point of many transfers...Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them. From the point of view of the historical entitlement conception of justice in holdings, those who start afresh to complete "to each according to his _______" treat objects as if they appeared from nowhere, out of nothing.

[N]o end-state principal or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives. Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the principle, by people choosing to act in various ways: for example, by people exchanging goods and services with other people, or giving things to other people, things the transferrers are entitled to under the favored distributional pattern. To maintain a pattern one must either continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually (or periodically) interfere to take from some persons resources that others for some reason chose to transfer to them.

[B]y justifying rights with needs, we started confusing them...I do have the right to as much quality in my life as possible. What I don't have -- and what the statist social engineers fail to understand that I lack -- is the right to be given what I need to fulfill that right. I have the right to pursue my needs be they physical, like food, or emotional, like pretty paintings, or spiritual, like finding God. But my need does not equal someone else's debt.