Free Republic

<p>Is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looking to crawl out of the not-so-little political box he put himself in - the campaign promise that the state's budget gap can be closed without any new taxes? "That does not mean that later on someday you cannot go there," Schwarzenegger recently told The Sacramento Bee. In other recent interviews with other newspapers, the governor has similarly gone from a fast-and-firm no to a fudging maybe.</p>

<p>That law should be based on fairness is an axiom of our age. The premise of many policies is moral: The prohibition against murder reflects the Judeo-Christian conception of human beings made in the image of God and possessing transcendent value. But in "Fairness Versus Welfare," Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, both Harvard law professors, challenge this conventional wisdom. They argue that what matters most is whether a particular policy promotes the general welfare, saying "we discover very little basis for the use of notions of fairness as independent evaluative principles."</p>