Discussion of Seidl’s Paper

The paper deals with a wide range of topics, covering the definition of rights, justice, efficiency versus equality of rights, conflicts of rights and basic rights. It starts with Sen’s well-known theorem on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal and ends with a discussion of the dangers of democracy. There is a diversity of interesting ideas, but it is difficult to see the main message of the paper. A related problem is the lack of an explicit model, which would specify, for example, what each agent knows at which point of time. Instead, the author seems to switch between different implicit models. In the following remarks I shall give a selection of comments on Sections 2 to 5 of the paper; the paper’s first section is only a restatement of known results and the last section mainly repeats arguments and judgements from the public choice literature.