doing so we could make the array of outcomes even more just from a distributive point of view. In a book on social justice published in the mid-1970s, F.A. Hayek took these comments by Rawls to indicate that the difference between Rawls's approach and his own approach is "more verbal than substantial."46 Rawls's work, he says, has been "wrongly ... interpreted as lending support to socialist demands." 4 7 He takes Rawls to agree with his own central claim that "[j]ustice is not concerned with those unintended consequences of a spontaneous order [such as a market] which have not been deliberately brought about by anybody."48 I think that Hayek is mistaken about this and that he exaggerates the implications of Rawls's refusal to consider the justice of particular allocations of goods. Rawls's position may be illuminated as follows: Suppose that, on one occasion, the institutions of our economy happen to yield a distribution of wealth, D1 , that is judged inferior in terms of the Difference Principle to another distribution, D2 . Should we immediately interfere and reallocate wealth so that we change D, into D 2? Rawls's answer, like Hayek's, is "no." For Hayek the matter ends there. But for Rawls there is a further question to be addressed: can we change the institutional structure so as to render it more likely in the future that the normal operation of our economy will yield distributions like D2 rather than D;? The answer to this may also be "no" because the proposed change might be incompatible with institutional virtues such as publicity, stability, and the rule of law. 4 9 The new institutions that are being suggested may not, as it were, hold up as institutions. Still-and this is what Hayek overlooks-the answer is not necessarily "no." If change is possible and if the resulting institutional structure would be viable, stable, et cetera, then we are required as a matter of justice to implement it for the Difference Principle just is the requirement that we arrange-and, if necessary, rearrange-our institutions so that social and economic inequalities are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. So, for example, if we find ourselves in a market society that lacks basic welfare provision, we have to consider whether the institutional structure of a market economy would be wrecked qua institutional structure by the addition of what Rawls calls a "transfer branch" charged with administering a social minimum.so Would that make it impossible for the economic structure as a whole to operate predictably, publicly, impersonally, and 46. 2 F.A. HAYEK, LAw, LEGISLATION AND LIBERTY: THE MIRAGE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE Xiii (1976). 47. 48. 49. 50. 790 Id at 100, 183 n.44. Id. at 38, 166 n.19. RAwLs, supra note 4, at 48-49, 206-13. Id. at 244-45.