The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

70 The Essential Rothbard
In another letter about Hayek, Rothbard challenges the dominant
orthodoxy in contemporary political philosophy. Hayek
agrees with critics of the free market that people do not deserve
the incomes they receive. But this is not, in his view, a failure of the
market. We have no objective means to assess the moral merits of
people, so moral desert cannot properly be a principle of distribution.
Rothbard dissents:
Hayek errs by denying that a free market apportions income
in accordance with merit. His argument is that since we know
nothing, we can’t know what a person’s merit is. . . . But all he
needed to do was to realize that “merit” in this sense simply
means merit in the production of goods and services
exchangeable on the market. Income is then apportioned in
proportion to this productivity. 191
To this, Hayek would reply that people do not “really” deserve
the value of what they produce, since arbitrary factors lie behind
the abilities people possess to contribute to production. Rothbard
“submit[s] that this is sheer nonsense.” Hayek has conjured up a
notion of “merit” that he has not defined and used this to challenge
the justice of distribution by results. He then says that distribution
cannot be in accord with “merit” in his sense: but this is true only
because he has characterized the concept in such a vague way that
one can never tell whether it has been satisfied. Rothbard, with his
characteristic insistence on clarity, finds no use for Hayek’s concept.
Rothbard has here gone beyond Robert Nozick. In responding
to Rawls’s claim that people do not deserve their earnings on the
market, Nozick responded that they might still be entitled to these
earnings. Rothbard asks: why stop with this? Why not say that
people do deserve the market value of what they produce?
191
Letter to Richard C. Cornuelle, October 23, 1956; Rothbard
Papers.