ABSTRACT
Housing associations are now building at least as many houses as local authorities under a bewildering regime of grants. The state remains involved in setting the legal regime for private landlordism and, through its tax concessions, is a dominant force in the owner-occupied market. So, far from removing the state from the housing market, this government has steadily woven a more and more complex web of involvement. Rawls, of course, argued that the shared sense of justice of which he talked not only existed but rested on certain principles of the distribution which could be deduced by those individuals occupying his ‘original position’. Most individualist libertarians accept that there is some level of the human existence at which a collective responsibility must be exercised by a nation state to preserve its citizens’ lives if it is to retain moral legitimacy.
