Many of our readers appreciated Elizabeth Anderson’s contribution to this blog a few months back, critical though it was of many key libertarian claims. I did too, though that’s no surprise as I’ve long been a fan of her work. For those of you who haven’t read it, her 1999 Ethics piece, “What is the Point of Equality?” is simply masterful. Tell me this opening line doesn’t pique your interest:

If much recent academic work defending equality had secretly been penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?

And it just gets better from there.

A lot of you probably don’t remember it, but Anderson was a frequent contributor to a short-lived blog called “Left2Right,” the conceit of which was to bring together a bunch of mostly left-leaning academic philosophers to engage in reasoned dialogue with those on the political “right.” The posts were infrequent and overly-long for the medium, but the lineup included some real superstars. In addition to Anderson, David Schmidtz, Gerald Dworkin, David Velleman, Stephen Darwall, and Joshua Cohen were all fairly regular participants.

But Anderson’s posts stole the show. And they hold up really quite well. For instance, I’m sure BHL readers would appreciate her piece on “What Hayek Saw” about the nature of a free society. Here’s a taste:

What is needed is a set of rules that leave people free to offer mutually advantageous exchanges, so as to systematically give people incentives to behave in ways that overall enhance the liberty and opportunities of everyone else.  Markets play an indispensable role in this, because prices signal to people where their productive efforts will be most valued by other people.  In contrast with a command economy, individuals in a market system are free to take or leave any particular opportunity open to them, free to respond to or ignore any particular bargain or incentive offered to them.  Moreover, market prices reflect the aggregate result of everyone’s free decision to demand this or that, rather than some bureaucrat’s notion of what they ought to be consuming.  These are two extremely important ways in which a system of procedural justice based on voluntary market exchange secures everyone’s freedom.  However, the most important way in which reliance on markets enhances everyone’s freedom concerns the dynamic effects of market competition in a private property regime in producing ever-expanding opportunities.

Less resonant with our biases here, but still excellent, is her series of posts on “How Not to Complain About Taxes,” in which she takes on arguments based on natural property rights, desert, and production and self-sufficiency. Good brain food in these days filled with cheap “You Didn’t Build That” memes.