Non-paternalistic Benevolence, Consumption Externalities and the Liberal Social Contract

Abstract

We examine the regulation of general consumption externalities by the liberal social contract. First-best liberal social contracts redistribute individual wealth and determine the level of provision of public commodities to achieve a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources that is unanimously preferred to the allocation of a hypothetical initial situation of perfect communication. We show that the social welfare functionals that aggregate individual social preferences by means of the generalized bargaining solution of Nash support the liberal social contract if they verify non-paternalistic benevolence, that is, if the associate social welfare functions are strictly increasing in the private welfare of all individuals. The existence of a liberal social contract follows as a corollary of this property of supportability. We characterize the liberal social contract as a case of application of Habermas?s norms of communicative action to the allocation of scarce resources by public finance and the market.