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From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Libertarianism & basketball
Message-ID: <4897@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Jan-85 02:20:39 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.4897
Posted: Thu Jan 10 02:20:39 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Jan-85 02:20:39 EST
References: <272@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 162

Reply to Richard Carnes:


	First, let me tell a slightly different fable.  A sports
	trainer spots a youth from a very poor family who has great
	talent for basketball.  The trainer offers the youth a decent
	subsistence in return for selling himself into slavery for
	life.  The youth agrees, considering this to be his best chance
	in life, and thenceforth the trainer makes $240,000 a year from
	his slave.  There is nothing in Nozick, so far as I am aware,
	which implies that there is anything wrong with this
	arrangement.  Here is what Nozick says about enslavement
	contracts:  "The comparable question about an individual is
	whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into
	slavery.  I believe that it would." [AS&U, p. 331]

This may be Nozick's view, but it is definitely not every libertarian
view. There are several common libertarian attacks on Nozick's view
about selling into slavery -- the first is that it can never be in
anyone's best interest to sell himself into slavery and therefore any
slave owner who has presented this claim as fact is guilty of fraud.

A second is that all contracts should be breakable. (This is
Murray Rothbard's argument.) There may be great penalties involved
in breaking a contract, but they still must be breakable.

Actually, Nozick goes wishy-washy on this particular issue: if a good
is essential for the survival of someone, then noone (according to
Nozick) can claim it as property. [I think that this is a flaw in
his entitlements theory, though not the most serious one.] Is freedom
essential for survival as a human being? This would make an interesting
court case!

The other flaw is that Nozick believes that it is possible to compensate
people for coercion applied to them. Therfore, if the poor man could claim
that coercion was used in getting him to sell himself into slavery, then
he could demand that he be recompensated for the damage done to him.

The tricky question is ``who decides what is just compensation''? Nozick
isn't all that clear about this...


	[Let me throw in another libertarian fable here, although it is
	not directly relevant:  The Mayflower lands, and most of the
	Pilgrims remain on board to settle on a political
	constitution.  One Pilgrim, however, sneaks ashore and claims
	Massachusetts.  According to libertarian principles, the other
	Pilgrims will have to rent or buy land from the one who owns
	Massachusetts, or else move on to New Hampshire.  Anything
	wrong with this scenario, libertarians?]

Yep. Nozick uses the Lockean ``mixing your labour with land'' to
designate what is property. Putting up a fence isn't good enough.
So, the One Pilgrim can get all the land he can reasonably use
[Nozick is vague on what is reasonable] but that sure isn't going
to be all of Massachusettes. Of course, the real thing that is
wrong with this scenario is that the Indians were there first, and
you aren't considering *their* property rights....


	Now let me retell Nozick's fable, making a small change which
	will not affect Nozick's argument.  We start with one's favored
	distribution of wealth, D, having been actually realized in the
	society.  Now consider a young lady, Brooke, whose chief
	achievement in life thus far is to be beautiful (this she has
	accomplished by a clever choice of genes).  A million people a
	year pay her 25 cents each to see her face in magazines, so she
	makes $250,000 a year.  Another young lady, Carol, studies
	modern dance and works at it six hours a day (while holding a
	job to support herself).  Eventually she turns professional and
	makes $6,000 a year as a dancer.  There is now a new
	distribution of wealth, E.  Nozick asks, Is not this new
	distribution just?  Each person who paid to see Brooke or Carol
	parted with his money voluntarily.  If the people were entitled
	to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled under
	D, didn't this include their being entitled to give it to
	Brooke rather than to Carol?  Can anyone complain on grounds of
	justice?

	Well, yes, I think Carol can, who is not only talented but
	works far harder than Brooke, whose hardest work is applying
	her makeup.  Nozick is asking us to believe that distributive
	justice has nothing to do with what individuals DESERVE.

Whoops! In using the word DESERVE you are making a huge judgement here.
You assume that there is some way to measure what people deserve, which
is distinct from ``what people are willing to pay for''. You seem to
be connecting this to ``working hard''. The problem is that it is
difficult to determine who is actually ``working harder''. Do
ditch diggers work harder than physics professors? 

Now, ideally, the people you think deserve the most amount of money
should get paid the most amount of money, right? Therefore, at D
time Brooke could expect to get less money (in salary) than Carol.
However, in handing over their money to Brooke rather than to Carol,
thouse thousands of people are saying that they value what Brooke
is doing more than what Carol is doing.

Hmm. I think that this sucks. However, given that I want to change this,
what I really want to change is the fact that people value the
appearance of people so much. (if my only problem was that Carol
didn't have enough money then I could either give her some of mine,
or try to convince Brooke to give her some of hers.) I would rather that
people sent their 25 cents to a charitable foundation for the arts then
gave it to Brooke. [By the way, I have precisely the same problem with
Wilt Chamberlein. I wish people didn't value sports, either.] 
Consciousness raising is tough work. I don't expect it to be easy, and
I don't expect it to change much in my lifetime.

However, taking money away from Brooke to give to Carol does nothing
to fix the basic problem *that human beings are making bad choices
when they pay so much money to watch Brooke*. It also doesn't
change the fact that this is *my opinion* and, obviously, other
people think that paying money to see either Wilt Chamberlein or
Brooke is a good decision. I have the right to do my utmost to
convince people that they are mistaken in this belief -- I do
*not* have the right to coerce people into acting as I would have
them act.

	Individuals need not make money the old-fashioned way in
	Nozick's society, EARNING it by merit, in order for the outcome
	to be just.  It is sufficient that the transfers have not
	involved coercion or fraud.  Is this the position of (all,
	most, some) libertarians, or am I misstating it in some way?

You are mistating it. The problem that you have is that you are
making a distinction between ``what a person earns by merit'' and
``what other people are willing to pay for it''. I think that this
distinction is artificial. What you have is your own standard
(what I would be willing to pay for it) and the unhappy knowledge
that other people's standards are not your own. However, collectively,
the decisions of these individuals fix the price on any good or
service provided and this is a measure of what it is *worth*.

If your complaint is that libertarians do not guarantee that people
would be as enlightened as to pick your particular standard of
values, well, yes, then this is so. However, how am I supposed to
know that your values are superior to mine? By letting you convince
me? This is entirely consistent with libertarianism. If the truth
that Carol deserves more than Brooke is that obvious then after
you have managed to enlighten a sufficiently large number of people
then this adjustment will just happen (as people who now have
chosen to adopt your values pay to see Carol whereas before they
would have paid to see Brooke). If this truth is not so obvious,
then what do you have which distinguishes you from any other
person whose beliefs I disagree with?

	At any rate, it is evident why Nozick is concerned to
	demonstrate that market outcomes are just:  Nozick's minimal
	state is not allowed to "correct" market outcomes by
	redistribution of wealth, even though, as Hayek admits, market
	outcomes depend to a great extent on luck.  We thus see, not
	for the last time, how the defense of the minimal state is
	linked to the defense of capitalism.

Actually, Nozick's entitlement theory has a great deal to say about
redistribution of wealth, which Nozick thinks is sometimes justified.
However, I think he is being inconsistent here.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!laura