Is Politics Insoluble?

The Case for the Minimal State I 63
looks the whole history of how the present "distribution" of
goods came about. "Things come into the world already
attached to people having entitlements over them. From the
point of view of the historical entitlement conception ofjustice
in holdings, those who start afresh to complete 'to each accord-
ing to his ' treat objects as if they appeared from
nowhere, out of nothing."
How did the existing "distribution" of things come about?
It came about because some people made the things they now
hold, or because they were paid their marginal contribution to
output in wages, or because they inherited property, or the
objects (or money) were given to them by their parents, their
spouses, or their friends. So even if the state made some "pat-
terned" redistribution of wealth— "to each according to his
needs," or to each equally—that pattern would very quickly be
upset by some people continuing to create more than others,
or some people giving freely to others, or some people volun-
tarily paying well for certain services, or to see or hear a par-
ticular professional athlete or performer, and so on. As Nozick
sums up: "The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist
acts between consenting adults."
The system of entitlements is defensible, he argues, "when
constituted by the individual aims of individual transactions.
No overarching aim is needed, no distributional pattern is
required."
He goes on later to contend persuasively that: "Taxation of
earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor (page 169)."
Unfinished Ar^ments
But in spite of many excellences, Nozick's argument for his
minimal state is in the end not quite convincing. A good part
of the reason for this is revealed in his own description of his
procedure in his Preface: