In his remarks (PDF) introducing Liberale Vernunft, Sociale Verwirrung, a selection of essays translated in German, Anthony de Jasay contrasts his approach of critical analysis of modern liberalism with futile attempts to justify a strict liberal alternative by appealing to arbitrary values and emotions.
On taking the counter-offensive, I should also like to see it use the weapon and the mode of combat that gives liberalism an advantage over its adversaries: cold analytical reasoning instead of rhetorical appeals to “values” and the emotions they ignite. Rhetoric about the love of freedom, free enterprise and individual responsibility will never beat appeals to “positive rights”, fair shares and social solidarity. But demonstration of the faulty logic or the brazen arbitrariness that underlies these slogans may beat them, not so much in the minds of the general public, but in the minds of those young academic teachers and journalists who will be decisive in shaping the minds of the general public of the future.
In a recent piece on social justice The Library of Economics and Liberty Jasay writes that no case for the presumption of equality can be made in analogy with the presumption of liberty:
There is not even a presumption of equality based on some asymmetry between equality and inequality in the same way as there is a logically derivable presumption for liberty, for title to possessions and for innocence. All the latter are based on claims to the contrary being verifiable but not falsifiable, hence on the burden of proof lying squarely with the accusation that can verify and not with the defence that cannot falsify the accusation.
No such asymmetry favours an equal distribution of goods, nor an unequal one. You can say that the distribution is to be equal unless sufficient reason is brought why it should be unequal. But you can no less sensibly say that it should be unequal unless sufficient reason is brought why it should be equal. The two statements are formally equivalent.
As Jasay sees it, equality is not a fact of life, nor a demand of reason.