Rawls’s writings did much to push academic and political opinion in favor of policies such as stringent campaign-finance regulations, universal health care, and increasing inheritance taxes.
David Lewis Schaefer, a Holy Cross College professor, writes that
What Rawls contributed to the political education of American intellectuals was not any sort of rigorous analysis, but an overall spirit or outlook detrimental to freedom. He coined a doctrine of what he called “excusable envy,” according to which it is rational to envy people whose superiority in wealth exceeds certain (unspecified) limits, and to act on that passion.
Not an enviable legacy, this spreading of the spirit of envy. (“Justice and Inequality,” Wall Street Journal, July 23)