ABSTRACT
I suspect that for most people, the terms libertarian and meritocratic suggest two approaches to justice that have much in common. Some may even think that the meritocrat’s ideal world and the libertarian’s ideal world are one and the same. This is not so. Meritocratic justice and libertarian justice are incompatible, in concept and in application. The meritocratic ethos is not the libertarian ethos. And if we want to live in a meritocracy, we must implement public policies that cannot possibly be justified under libertarianism. In short, one can be a meritocrat, or one can be a libertarian, but one cannot be both. My primary purpose in this essay is to explain why.
