If I read your quote from White correctly, he is starting from a presumption that existing property rights have a moral standing of their own, which cannot be over-ridden by the state that created them. This is the typical Lockean position, but entirely baseless. As Hume said, you never have to go far back in the history of any piece of durable property to find force or fraud. I don't know what If anything Kant had to say about this.
The real objection to the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is the compensation is typically hypothetical.
“The outcomes of cost-benefit analysis tend to mimic the outcomes that would emerge with market mechanisms, and if one is justified the other is too. “
This is an empirical claim that is very difficult to test. It is good rhetoric, though. To what degree are the tasks of a central planner analogous to the task of a cost-benefit analyzer? And to what extent to criticisms of one apply to the other? Cost-benefit analyzers at least have a context of market prices to use in their estimations. But they still lack the feedback from profits and losses that guide entrepreneurs.
“differences in terms of willingness to pay (or other economic measurements reflecting implicit market prices) are due to structural inequalities that are themselves presumably not justified.”
If this is disqualifying, most, perhaps all international trade and much domestic trade is rendered illegitimate. Structural inequalities are ubiquitous and hard to fix.
“Treating migrants as if they were mere merchandise is a clear case of disrespect.”
Isn’t this a flaw of any modern mass society that must deal with large numbers of persons by means of a bureaucracy? Bureaucracies themselves can be good or bad, but they of necessity treat persons as molecules in a chemical reaction. Do we have recourse when we feel violated? Often we do not.
If I read your quote from White correctly, he is starting from a presumption that existing property rights have a moral standing of their own, which cannot be over-ridden by the state that created them. This is the typical Lockean position, but entirely baseless. As Hume said, you never have to go far back in the history of any piece of durable property to find force or fraud. I don't know what If anything Kant had to say about this.
The real objection to the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is the compensation is typically hypothetical.
“The outcomes of cost-benefit analysis tend to mimic the outcomes that would emerge with market mechanisms, and if one is justified the other is too. “
This is an empirical claim that is very difficult to test. It is good rhetoric, though. To what degree are the tasks of a central planner analogous to the task of a cost-benefit analyzer? And to what extent to criticisms of one apply to the other? Cost-benefit analyzers at least have a context of market prices to use in their estimations. But they still lack the feedback from profits and losses that guide entrepreneurs.
“differences in terms of willingness to pay (or other economic measurements reflecting implicit market prices) are due to structural inequalities that are themselves presumably not justified.”
If this is disqualifying, most, perhaps all international trade and much domestic trade is rendered illegitimate. Structural inequalities are ubiquitous and hard to fix.
“Treating migrants as if they were mere merchandise is a clear case of disrespect.”
Isn’t this a flaw of any modern mass society that must deal with large numbers of persons by means of a bureaucracy? Bureaucracies themselves can be good or bad, but they of necessity treat persons as molecules in a chemical reaction. Do we have recourse when we feel violated? Often we do not.