fuss:philosophy:thinkers:robert_nozick [Wizardry and Steamworks]

Robert Nozick

Nozick puts forth that the current distribution of wealth is right if and only if your own holdings consist only of wealth that other people gave you voluntarily,
Nozick argues that it is wrong to injure a person or take away their property without their consent, unless it is necessary to do so in order to protect another person's right to their person or their property,
counters Rawl's idea of the welfare state, stating that the only legitimate use of a state is a state that restricts itself to upholding no more than individual rights,
- the minimal state or the night watchman state, ie: a state whose delegated tasks are enforcing the rules without interfering in any other civic matters,
sustains that justice does not mean wealth distribution as per the Rawlsian welfare state but rather that justice is intrinsic to the rules that have been agreed upon and independent of notions of quality of life,
- Nozick argues that therefrom, liberal society is in fact neutral to any moral values that each individual might hold,
Nozick makes an argument against distribution of wealth, claiming that even if you were to distribute wealth on given pattern, some people to whom the wealth is distributed to might start trading and supposing that people would like certain individuals more than others, then those individuals would end up with most of the wealth. Therefore, in order to be truthful to the distribution of wealth, and enforce the distribution pattern (for instance, an egalitarian pattern where wealth would be distributed equally), a constant intervention is required to ensure that no concentration of wealth is possible. It follows as per the judgement, that any patterned distribution of wealth would require a dictatorship or tyranny,