I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf:
Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us to reflect on what justice really demands, rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that the market can take care of morality for us. If you remain a steadfast Nozickian, you have the option of biting the bullet (as philosophers like to say) and embracing the counterintuitive implications of your view. This would be at least more consistent than what we have today: an ideology that parades as moral common sense.
I think the problem in this debate is that it seems always to be posed in either/or terms--that it's either the market or the state. And it's not; it's both. The political challenge is to find the right balance between them. That's what the principle of subsidiarity is all about.
If there is anybody out there reading here who leans libertarian, please tell me why a single-payer system in health care, like Medicare, is immoral or an abrogation of your liberty rather than the most effective way to provide for a basic human need. Do you really believe that the only motivation for talented people to go into healthcare is to get rich? Do you think most people are only extrinsically motivated by financial rewards? Or is it possible that most people who are attracted to the healthcare professions are motivated intrinsically, by the desire to help and to make a difference in people's lives, by the intellectual and creative challenges posed by sickness and disease? If you think it's the first, what does that say about the culture's moral imagination.
I'm not interested in arguments against single payer that we can't afford it--we can if we want to. I'm interested in moral arguments. If we can come to some agreement on a moral values level, we can work out the practicalities relatively easily.