In the first two lectures on political philosophy, we discussed redistribution of wealth from the point of view of Rawls’ very famous and rather extreme proposals, and the more moderate, consequentialism-ish counter-proposal I gave. I’ve also defended free markets in general, while saying labor laws are sometimes beneficial.

Now I want to consider a much more extreme critique of Rawls, from Robert Nozick, who is philosophy’s great libertarian, in the political sense. You should be aware that there’s another sense of “libertarian” used in philosophy, about free will. We’ll get to free will maybe a few lectures from now, for now we’re talking about politics. If you’ve heard of Ayn Rand, that’s roughly what we’re talking about in this context.

Before I say too much about Nozick’s views, a little of the history here: Rawls and Nozick were both professors at Harvard in the 70′s. Rawls came out with his most famous book, /A Theory of Justice/ in 1971, and in 1974 Nozick came out with his most famous book, /Anarchy, State, and Utopia/. /Anarchy, State, and Utopia/ covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it was taken up with responding to Rawls. That means it’s sometimes unclear how Nozick would respond to other views, but I’ll do my best on that count.

Perhaps the best-known example that Nozick has used to illustrate his ideas is the Wilt Chamberlain example. Wilt Chamberlin, for those who don’t know, was this basketball player who was big in the 60s, early 70s, had a rivalry with Bill Russell, who my undergraduate prof Keith Yandell always told us was the greatest basketball player ever, and Chamberlin was also notorious for claiming, late in life, that he had slept with like 20,000 women over the course of his life… that’s Wilt Chamberlain.

Nozick asks what we are to make of a celebrity like Wilt Chamberlain who makes a lot of money being a celebrity, and to make the case more favorable to him, asks us to imagine that Wilt Chamberlain has a special contract where the audience to some extent is interacting directly with Chamberlain, because at games where he plays the audience has to drop an extra quarter in a separate box and he gets everything in it. Probably, it would have been better if Nozick had imagined a music star where the one guy is the absolute star of the show, rather than basketball, and you can imagine that the star is the first one to get all the ticket money, and then out of that he pays his back up band and all other expenses as an agreed upon rate. That makes the scenario a little more plausible. Anyway, the key thing is you’ve got a celebrity who gets rich by dealing directly with his or her fans.

Now you’ve got this guy who’s gotten rich through a perfectly fair, transparent exchange. Then you’ve got Rawls, or someone with similar, maybe not exactly the same, views, saying that the resources of a society need to be distributed in a fair way, and this seemingly fair, transparent exchange may create a situation that conflicts with whatever principles of justice you’re inclined to accept as fair. Therefore, if we take seriously these principles of justice, the government would have to constantly interfere with these seemingly transparent, free exchanges, and that doesn’t really seem credible.

Nozick takes this a step further. He thinks that as a basic moral principle, property acquired in a fair way can’t be taken away by the government. For Nozick, a fair way is when you acquire property through your labor (following Locke) or exchange it freely. Once you’ve acquired something justly, the government has no more right to take it away from you than a highwayman does. That is what people are saying when they say taxation is theft, like in science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s novel /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/, which is about a group of revolutionaries who, among other things, finance their revolution by stealing the money they need, and the revolutionary who makes this decision is a spokesperson for libertarianism, to an extent anarchism, who says that in stealing the money to finance their revolution, they’re not behaving differently than how governments behave, and they’re just being more honest about it.

Before we get into the extreme “taxation is theft” view, what does a Rawlsian say about the Wilt Chamberlain problem? The first step, I think, is to concede that constant government interference is bad, but not necessarily because it’s wrong in principle, but just because economically, it can be inefficient. It’s very plausible that from an economic point of view, general laws, percentile taxes and such, may better fulfill the principles of justice than constant interference. Remember, inequality is OK according to Rawls as long as it helps the least well-off. If the people going to see Wilt Chamberlain are the poorest in society, but the society is so well-off in general that nobody has any lacks much greater than not being able to see a great basketball player play–in that case letting people see Wilt Chamberlain play helps the least well off.

Admittedly, Rawls doesn’t have a very good response to the case where the people benefiting from watching Wilt Chamberlain play aren’t among the worst-off in society, where they’re say middle class. That’s a point where the position that cares for the middle class is more plausible than Rawls. In any case, the Wilt Chamberlain example isn’t a very powerful challenge to the view that income should be taxed to pay for social services like health care and education for the poor. Nozick might call that a form of constant interference, but it’s a much more defensible form of “constant interference” than trying to micro-manage economic interactions to fit some principles of distributive justice.

What about the claim that taxation is theft, or, as Nozick puts it, that taxation is on par with forced labor? The way Nozick puts it, taxation is like forced labor, because you have to work extra to get the things that you want. The problem with both the theft and forced labor comparisons, is first, that everything is like everything else to some small degree. A podium and a boot are both solid objects. A boot and air are both made of atoms. Little obviously follows from this, because there are also many potentially relevant differences. Theft is done by one person or a small gang, taxation is something governments, some democratically elected, do. With forced labor, you get beaten if you don’t work at all. With taxation, you can not work at all, and if you don’t work extra to make up the loss from taxation, you loose only a fraction of the goods earned from work.

In the section of his book immediately after the general claim that taxation is on par with forced labor, Nozick also suggests taxation is unfair to the person whose preferred enjoyments don’t come cheap–the person who doesn’t much enjoy sunsets, and can only really enjoy movies and such. I mention this because it’s a fairly famous passage, but I’m not sure what it has of value. Of course people who have difficulty enjoying life will be at a disadvantage, but what follows from that in terms of political philosophy? Why does this make taxation especially unfair? All I can figure is that Nozick was joking, making fun of Rawls’ suggestion that it is unfair for the talented to be the only ones to benefit from their talents, and that the state should redistribute wealth even when the only reason for inequality in wealth is inequality in talent. Nozick’s suggestion about sunsets and movie tickets reads a bit like a parody of that. But I worry he may have been serious on that point.

Aside from the weak justification Nozick gives for his anti-tax views, they seem to conflict with things almost everyone, including Nozick, believes about legitimate functions of the state. Nozick agrees that a “minimum state,” one which only concerns itself with safety from violence, theft, and the like, is legitimate. Like Rawls, he approaches this conclusion from the point of view of a hypothetical contract. However, instead of asking what we’d do behind a “veil of ignorance,” he asks what would happen in a situation where we have normal knowledge, but there was no government. In this case, Nozick argues that to protect themselves from violence and theft people would form voluntary protective associations, and with time these would evolve into state-like entities. Each area would have its own dominant organization, and labor would be divided so a few people are paid by everyone else to be the police while everyone else gets on with their lives.

However, to be like real governments, these organizations would have to use coercion to make people pay for their protective services. The only alternative, it seems, is that people who don’t pay their police fees would be declared “fair game” for others to attack with impunity. That seems worse than merely being prosecuted for tax evasion. This problem of prosecuting someone vs. making them “fair game” illustrates the difficulty in having a really non-coercive world. If you want people to not have to worry about being shot for not doing as others wish, you have to be willing to do something unpleasant to those who have or are trying to shoot people for not doing as the shooters want.

For these reasons, I don’t think Nozick’s arguments for libertarianism are all that good. However, there’s one angle I’ve bypassed. In all four of these lectures, I’ve side-stepped the issue of capitalism, using wealth to get more wealth, which is really distinct from the free market, that is to say being able to exchange goods other people value more for goods you value more. You might think that what should happen is the government controls all the forms of wealth that can be used to produce more wealth, factories and such, what Marx called the “means of production.” People could then gain access to it on some democratic or egalitarian basis, and only then set free to operate under free-market conditions.

Nozick has some Wilt Chamberlain-style concerns about such an arrangement, and the level of interference required to establish it. In a free market system, it would be very easy for people to seek out tools needed to create basement mini-factories. Would you have to have a division of law enforcement to prosecute these people? This problem is especially big in the 21st century, where PC clusters have replaced supercomputers, so if you saved up for several PCs you could get a small computer company running out of your home. The government of such a society would also have to worry about people with private dental equipment, private artist’s or jeweler’s tools, private tools for fixing technology. Given reasonably liberal contract-making powers, you could also get powerful companies that deal in intellectual property.

Nozick also asks, on this question, if lack of capital is the cause of worker’s sorrows, then why don’t rich modern unions start buying factories for their members? A plausible explanation is that managing capital requires some skill, including skill at managing risk, and can’t be done by just anyone. Even someone like Paris Hilton, just coasting on inherited wealth, has to get her trust fund into competent hands. When the government tries to collectivize capital, it might not end up in competent hands. Finally, accumulated capital is a much stronger incentive than a short-term windfall for doing good work, and may help motivate people to work for society’s benefit.

The moral of all this is that even when we throw out Nozick’s anti-tax claims, and accept social services funded by an income tax and inheritance tax, there are still good reasons for the government not to micromanage the economy, either in terms ensuring fair distribution of goods or fair distribution of capital. Nozick is right that guaranteeing a “fair” pattern in these things could easily require more interference in our lives than we want.

At the end of the lecture series on smaller-scale ethical questions, I mentioned that it’s important to look at how various ideas work out in practice, not just the theoretical arguments. In practice, the sort of welfare-state capitalism I’ve been outlining works out pretty well. Overall material prosperity, as I said in a previous lecture, has increased greatly over the decades, and this has been mainly though individual enterprise. The rich are in a position to get richer, but the poor aren’t trapped. My mom’s dad came from a poor background, but he went to college on the GI bill and worked his way up from being an accountant to being a corporate president. My dad’s parents weren’t well-off, but they saved money for their kids to go to college. My dad went to dental school and made a good living as a dentist, while one of his brothers worked for the government designing missiles, and then got rich by founding his own company that did similar work only with car manufacturing. In college one of my good friends was from a working class background, enough that he was late paying tuition one semester, but still was on his way to having a good job in scientific research. American capitalism really does work for making people’s lives better, I hope these last four lectures have helped you see why.