Point for "hurtling".

Rawls' "Initial Position" is a thought exercise in determining what is just.
In the exercise, one imagines that one has no knowledge of the qualities or particulars of one's existence.
From there one could supposedly best choose what is just: because one would be driven by the fear of assigning oneself the short end of the stick once knowledge of existence returned.

To me, this is little more than "do unto others..." dressed up as serious academics.

The sticking point for me always was, as I'm sure it is for any Objectivist who thinks about the problem - if I have no knowledge of the particulars of my existence, then how do I know what to value so that I might make a choice?
In order to value justice, there must be a self to perform the evaluation.
And that self, unless the evaluation is to be no more than whim, must understand why it is valuing one thing over another.

But, this is not allowed in Rawls' "Initial Position".
The evaluation must be, in an Objectivist sense, self-less.

I believe that it is this self-lessness which make Rawls' philosophy so attractive to the Libertarian Left.

I'll read the full article later, but if the gist is that Cato has been overtaken by the Left Libertarians, then write them off.
They are co-opted.
They are gone.

I am unaware of his metaphysics/epistemology, but it would not surprise. Jeremy Bentham first proposed utilitarianism to justify a free market, but ended up a socialist. He called Locke's Natural Rights, "nonsense upon stilts." This is the typical argument of a strict empiricist.

I always thought that Rawls' initial position smacked of Platonism.
Much like Plato's forms, it's an interesting thought exercise.
However, try to apply it and you're hurtling toward utopia.

I knew that CATO had gotten off track because of their attack on patents, but this shows that it is a much deeper problem. Essentially it is a version of Utilitarianism, which always leads to tyranny.

I did not know that.
Well, that sucks.

Note the CATO Institute has become a Social Justice advocacy:

"Brink Lindsey, then Vice President for Research at the Cato Institute, called on libertarians to abandon the doctrine that a good government is one that protects the rights of its citizens, abandon the non-aggression principle, and instead adopt the moral standard of social justice advanced by Rawls. By Lindsey’s reasoning, free markets are not moral because they protect individuals’ rights to keep the fruits of their own labors and to freely contract with other individuals doing the same but are moral because they benefit the poor. Period."