capitalism

294 Liberal Critique of Libertarianism
possibility that these external resources are initially owned
by humankind in common. If we accept this view (like
many natural rights theorists, including Aquinas and
Locke), there need not be a straightforward move from
ownership of one’s person to a right to the unlimited accumulation
of external wealth. For the community as a whole
would retain a right to place limits on the legitimate acquisition
of wealth by individuals because it, too, has rightful
claims that require enforcement.
This line of argument allows welfare liberals to defend
redistributive taxation without denying self-ownership. If
the state is the agent of the whole political community, as
liberals have traditionally thought, under this argument, it
presumably has at least a limited right to dictate the terms
on which self-owners can draw on the common stock of
resources owned by that community. On this view, redistributive
taxation enforces limits on private appropriation
and makes available funds that the community can then
deploy to ensure that access to the common stock of
resources is not unfairly denied to any of its members.
Thus, public redistribution need not be on a par with theft,
but rather is a device for balancing the entitlement of individual
self-owners to accumulate wealth and the residual
right of the whole community to a fair share of the
resources of the world and their fruits.
Libertarians vigorously contest this argument and deny its
compatibility with the self-ownership principle. They insist
that it effectively eviscerates that principle by licensing the
communal exploitation of personal assets. It is misleading,
they say, to depict public redistribution as a restoration
of resources wrongly expropriated from a common pool.
Rather, it directly confiscates acquisitions that reflect the personal
skill, talent, and energy of producers and denies them
what self-ownership requires: a right to the full fruits of their
efforts and their contributions. Libertarians often support this
counterargument by seizing on an unfortunate phrase used
by John Rawls in his famous defense of a welfare liberal
position presented in A Theory of Justice. There Rawls
argued that a just society should regard “the distribution of
natural talents” as a “collective asset” (p. 87). According to
libertarian critics, this notion gives the game away. Welfare
liberalism institutes communal ownership of personal assets;
therefore, it must be inconsistent with self-ownership.
But this description is not a fair construal of the position
taken by Rawls and by welfare liberals more generally.
As many welfare liberals point out, among them Jeremy
Waldron in The Right to Private Property, Rawls does not
treat talents themselves, but rather their distribution, as a
collective asset. This formulation is regrettably obscure, but
Rawls’s point follows. The question of how far individuals
may personally benefit from the natural distribution of skills
and talents depends ultimately on the scheme of legal rules
and conventions in place. Different sets of legal rules and
conventions allow distributive outcomes to be determined
by the natural distribution of personal assets to greater or
lesser degrees. Because these conventions form an alterable
public framework of rules, the state can consider imposing
rules that require those favored by the natural distribution of
personal assets to transfer some of their acquired wealth to
those relatively ill favored.
Rawls argued that such rules are required as a matter
of basic justice. But whatever else might be said against
his position, it seems compatible with the thesis of selfownership.
The presence of rules placing limits on external
acquisition need not imply that people are not owners of
their original personal assets. Therefore, the bare thesis of
self-ownership leaves open the possibility of rules requiring
redistribution of acquired assets.
But suppose these welfare liberal counterarguments fail
and we grant that libertarian conclusions do follow from
the thesis of self-ownership. What about the thesis of selfownership?
Many welfare liberals are troubled by the fact
that, in the minds of some libertarians, self-ownership rights
are fully alienable. Hence, self-owners may, among other
things, sell themselves into slavery. These libertarians
accept this idea on the grounds that property rights imply
the right to use and abuse. Although it may be foolish for
self-owners to enslave themselves or engage in other forms
of self-abuse, they have the right to do so. But, as even John
Stuart Mill saw, there is something paradoxical about a theory
that claims to take individual liberty seriously and yet
permits slavery under certain conditions. If any conclusion
seems illiberal, surely this one does.
This concern raises deeper doubts about the liberal credentials
of libertarian premises. What makes the thesis of
self-ownership true? Why should liberals accept it? The
answer depends on the form the statement regarding selfownership
takes. Libertarians sometimes suggest, as David
Boaz does, that self-ownership is rationally self-evident.
However, this view is hard to accept. As we have seen, one
possible implication of the self-ownership thesis is that
slavery can be morally legitimate under some circumstances,
but many will think it self-evident that slavery is
never legitimate under any circumstances.
Furthermore, it is inconvenient for the self-evidence
claim that Locke (often treated as a libertarian hero)
rejected self-ownership in the form proposed by contemporary
libertarians and that Kant (also regularly recruited by
contemporary libertarians to their cause) repudiated selfownership
in any form.
An alternative and better answer is that the thesis of selfownership
provides an interpretation of individual freedom
and its value. On this view, liberals should endorse selfownership
because it is the best available characterization
of what it means to respect individuals’ equal rights to freedom
and independence. This idea seems plausible up to a
point. Self-ownership implies that my personal concerns
are my own business, that I am ultimately responsible for