Even in cases in which the unequal starting positions of individuals are ‘determined by earlier unjust acts or institutions’ – as the racial inequality that he tacitly acknowledged in the United States surely was – Hayek argued that it would generally be ‘impracticable’ to correct it. It would be preferable, he suggested, to ‘accept the given position as due to accident and simply from the present onwards to refrain from any measures aiming at benefiting particular individuals or groups’. Hayek acknowledged that, given the centrality of the family in a child’s initial social position, inequalities between families would be perpetuated over time. In fact, he endorsed inherited wealth precisely because such a perpetuation of inequality supposedly created a better elite. Yet he took for granted that, wherever his children were placed, their welfare would be the sole responsibility of their new family. However much his children’s hopes were frustrated by ‘unmerited disappointment’, there was no justification for state action to equalise their chances. In privatising welfare and foreclosing redistribution, the neoliberals entrenched economic inequalities while naturalising gender subordination within the family and sanctioning race as the ‘natural ordering principle of the social’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 222