The social minimum is designed to ensure that no one unwillingly falls below a minimum level of well-being. In TJ Rawls assigned to the transfer branch of government the responsibility for ensuring that “the claims of need” are satisfied (TJ 243–244). Rawls suggests that the social minimum could be fulfilled by, e.g., family allowances, unemployment insurance, or a graded income supplement. In PL he endorses Rodney Peffer’s argument for a basic needs principle, lexically prior to the first principle, requiring that “citizens’ basic needs be met, at least insofar as their being met is necessary for citizens to understand and to be able fruitfully to exercise those rights and liberties” (PL 7; JF 44; cf. Peffer 1990). But Rawls rejects Philippe van Parijs’s argument that a social minimum should be guaranteed to everyone regardless of ability to work, arguing instead that “those who would surf off Malibumust ind a way to support themselves and would not be entitled to public funds” (PL 181–182; cf. van Parijs 1991). The idea of basic needs appears also in LP where Rawls says that decent societies, which enjoy the right of noninterference, guarantee that basic needs are met. Failure to satisfy basic needs may give rise, on the part of other peoples, to the duty of assistance (LP 37–38).