Can one be a Rawlsian and a libertarian?

For the past three days, I've had two completely different tabs open in my browser. I've been unwilling and unable to close them, unable to come to a conclusion about them, unable to reconcile them fully. I'm not going to try. Instead, to answer a question I was recently asked about my political position, I'm just going to post them, and explain why neither satisfies me:

The first comes from Eliezer Yudkowsky, who when asked why he's a libertarian:

What makes me a small-'l' libertarian isn't that I believe it's impossible— or easy— to reconfigure human brains using sufficiently advanced technology, or any other method.

What makes me a libertarian is that the prospect of having that reconfiguration done by the same system that managed to ban marijuana while allowing tobacco, subsidize ethanol made from corn, and turn the patent system into a form of legalized bludgeoning, makes me want to run screaming into the night until I fall over from lack of oxygen.

I am completely in sympathy with Eliezer's stance here. He's convinced, as am I, that eventually that technology will fall into human hands. The brain is a physical thing. The vast history of human beings shows a range of behaviors from unconscious, flightly, complete dissolution all the way to deliberate, utter, conscious and self-affirming devotion to a cause, from a pathetic inability to see outside one's monkeysphere all the way to an almost equally pathetic inability to distinguish good from evil-- every last one of these ranges is a knob somewhere in the brain that we will, someday, be able to grasp, turn, and tune.

On the other hand, Ari Kohen writes:

I don't feel less free when I look at the amount of money that comes out of my check every month, even though I'd rather have that money in my pocket. The reason is that I'm actually making a choice too: I choose to live in this country, with its government and tax structure and social safety nets. In fact, I embrace it. We can certainly do better in terms of those safety nets by working to make our government more efficient and effective, but that's not what [Ron] Paul is advocating; instead, he thinks that the vast majority of the government — and the services it provides — should simply be eliminated. To my mind, that would mean we'd be living in a very different political community, one that I wouldn't like nearly as much. I want to live in a political community that chooses to take care of others, one that is committed to the idea that no one should go hungry or be unable to get critical medical attention.

With this, too, I have significant sympathy, and this is why I can't reconcile these two points of view.

Is it possible to craft a system where civil service does not, in Heinlein's immortal phrase, become civil mastery? Where we derive service from our government in the form of safety nets for the ill-lucked, for those who did not inherit the advantages of higher education, stellar health or exquisite beauty?

John Rawls once famously explained his rejection of libertarianism by proposing a veil of ignorance:

Let each person participate in the crafting of a governing system without knowing his place in society, his class or social position, his fortune in distribution of natural assets and abilities.

While not really possible, it is a vastly better approach to justice, to vote on a system as if you did not know whether or for how long you'll be rich or poor, healthy or ill. Better than the current one, still in place, that, as Thucydides wrote 2500 years ago, "The powerful do as they will, and the weak accept as they must."

Is it possible to be both a libertarian, one who seeks freedom from civil mastery, and to be a Rawlsian, one who seeks civil service organized around a universal principle of justice? I doubt it, but just as the essential evidence of human history reveals that civil service inevitably leads to civil mastery continually drags me away from a full-throated defense of Rawls, so to must the principal that to avoid civil mastery we must destroy civil service drags me away from Nozick and libertarianism.