I disagree with 2 particular points in in the article you referenced, Chris. Dende will I hope forgive me for stealing and modifying his ideas.

Horner compares life to a race. That's not an unreasonable comparison I suppose, but then he compares "winning" or succeeding in life to "getting a lot of money." That's a bit shallow, don't you think? People have different aims in life; different goals. If you measure the success of a person's life by their income, whether or not they "won the race" by how much stuff they acquired along the way then Mother Theresa was an abject failure. In the same vein he assumes the "reward" people get for their ability is money. I think you need a discussion of what the purpose of life is before you can talk about how successful a person was at fulfulling that purpose.

The other bit I disagree with has to do with his cake example. He assumes that the fair way to distribute the cake is to give the larger share to the person who's hungriest in a distribute-the-wealth sort of scenario. He fails to address to two important points. (I realize that his is a symbolic example: in the same theme don't take my examples literally)

1) What is the social goal that is going to be reached by giving unequal shares? We have to know what we're trying to accomplish if we're to judge the success of an action. Are we trying to keep both parties from starving to death? In that case, as long as they both have a little, they'll survive. Are we trying to to ensure that every person consumes the exact same amount of calories of the course of a lifetime? That is, do we want to try to ensure equal outcomes by penalizing cake-producers and rewarding non-cake-producers? If so then by all means starve the cake-producers and feed the non-cake-producers. That would likely lead to fewer and fewer cake producers though. Do we want to stimulate cake production? Then we ought to reward the cake-producers with more of their cake, and give enough to get by to the hungry non-cake-producers, giving incentive to people to bake cakes.

2) To whom the does this cake belong? I assume it represents the wealth a government extracts from its citizens through taxes, and the cake-cutter represents the government.

One thing in the article that I quite liked was this admittedly out of context phrase: " so the state ought to take steps to ensure that people are given equal opportunities to get on in life. Thus the state should intervene to ensure that accidents of birth (race, gender, poverty) do not act as obstacles to success in the race of life." That seems perfectly reasonable to me. That doesn't talk about the importance of every single citizen having a shot at 'winning,' rather it talks about having a decent shot at '[getting] on in life'. To me that means a reasonable chance to neither starve nor freeze to death.

I don't understand why "the State" is required or expected to do these things, Mike. Perhaps you could explain.

I'll give it a shot, Jak. I believe that the government, any government, is more or less doomed to terrible ineptitude and incompetence. Its capacity for mischief far outweights its capacity for good; yet I think that having a government, a "State" if you will, is a necessary evil. That said, I think there are some protections that are important enough to justify the existance of a government. I'll give a few examples that I hope illustrate my point of view.

To restate: "the state should intervene to ensure that accidents of birth (race, gender, poverty) do not act as obstacles to success."

Imagine if you will a society where male children are much preferred to female children to the point where infanticide becomes a chronic problem. Being killed because you happen to be born a baby girl represents a significant obstacle to success by any definition, and such little girls are worthy of whatever protection a government can give.

Imagine a society where Jews are hated and scapegoated (is that a verb?), and are rounded up by the millions for slaughter simply because they or one of their ancestors happened to be born Jewish. Such people are worthy of shelter by a government.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a compelling example about those who happened to be born into poverty, so maybe I'll amend the statement and omit that. I'm sure Chris could come up with one :)

It's clear to me that a State would be required to do those things; it requires a group with enough power to essentially force people to stop doing what they want to do (namely kill babies and Jewish people).

I believe our social goal ought to be providing the best chance possible for everyone in our society to achieve his/her dream whatever it may be. The public role in that is to make the resources these people need in order to achieve that dream available. The topic of discussion here, is the distribution of resources not the overall success of a person's life. If Horner was suggesting otherwise then I also disagree with him on that point. The point here is to show that meritocracy is a fundamentally unfair way to distribute resources.

Mike, I think your cake metaphor is inadequate to describe the situation, so I am going to extend the metaphor to defend Horner's point of view. One of his points was that we all come to the grand banquet table of life with different amounts of cake on our plate. This is necessarily the case because there was an unequal outcome in the previous generation because they "merited" more or less resources themselves. We also come to the table with differing amounts of cake making materials. This includes flour sugar, etc. These differing amounts of resources have a profound effect on our opportunity to achieve the outcome we want. Is this a fair way to distribute resources? Allow me to switch to a race metaphor. Is it fair to allow some people to have a head start in the race. If they then win the race or finish high in the standings, did they really merit that success (in obtaining resources). Well partially, right. Insofar as they still had to run fast their is some merit there, but insofar as they had a head start there is not merit. This is simply unfair.

Another important point is to ask what tools a person used in baking there cake. Did they start out with those tools? Are those tools shared by all at the table? The analogy to the real world is things like the following. We use public roads to get to our place of business. If you go to a public university your tuition doesn't cover the entire real cost of your education, tax payers dollars do. The point is, if you are borrowing cake baking tools that are owned by all the cake bakers you don't deserve all the credit for producing that cake. You could not have done it without use of the publicly owned oven.

Finally, Mike wrote "That seems perfectly reasonable to me. That doesn't talk about the importance of every single citizen having a shot at 'winning,' rather it talks about having a decent shot at '[getting] on in life'. To me that means a reasonable chance to neither starve nor freeze to death." Why? Why shouldn't everyone have a chance to "win?" That seems clearly unfair to me.