Robert Frank and others have made the argument that income is a positional good that leads people into a PD rat-race: If everyone pursued it less, we could all be better off, but everyone has an individual incentive to push ahead of one's peers. The policy implication is an egalitarian, redistributionist one.
The positional PD model can also be applied to education. Assuming that liberals who favor the positional PD as a basis for a strongly progressive income tax do not favor it as a basis for high taxation of education, or other measures to discourage an educational rat-race, why not? is there an inconsistency that supports a skeptical perspective that sees liberalism as adhering to different principles on economics and culture (or a different skeptical perspective that sees liberalism as the reflection of the interests of a highly educated elite)? Liberal willingness to redistribute on the basis income but not education can be defended on utilitarian grounds, but the basic two-part, Rawlsian statement of liberal principles proposed in the last post does not justify the different treatment of the two cases on non-utilitarian grounds. That leaves open the question of whether there is a more nuanced statement of liberal principles that does work to distinguish the cases.
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