Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [29]
Occupational licensing requirements also wrongly interfere with freedom of choice. If an untrained barber wants to offer his less-than-expert services to the public, and if some customers are willing to take their chances on a cheap haircut, the state has no business forbidding the transaction. Friedman extends this logic even to physicians. If I want a bargain appendectomy, I should be free to hire anyone I choose, certified or not, to do the job. While it is true that most people want assurance of their doctor’s competence, the market can provide such information. Instead of relying on state licensing of doctors, Friedman suggests, patients can use private rating services such as Consumer Reports or the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.6
Free-Market Philosophy
In Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), Robert Nozick offers a philosophical defense of libertarian principles and a challenge to familiar ideas of distributive justice. He begins with the claim that individuals have rights “so strong and far-reaching” that “they raise the question of what, if anything, the state may do.” He concludes that “only a minimal state, limited to enforcing contracts and protecting people against force, theft, and fraud, is justified. Any more extensive state violates persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified.”7
Prominent among the things that no one should be forced to do is help other people. Taxing the rich to help the poor coerces the rich. It violates their right to do what they want with the things they own.
According to Nozick, there is nothing wrong with economic inequality as such. Simply knowing that the Forbes 400 have billions while others are penniless doesn’t enable you to conclude anything about the justice or injustice of the arrangement. Nozick rejects the idea that a just distribution consists of a certain pattern—such as equal income, or equal utility, or equal provision of basic needs. What matters is how the distribution came about.
Nozick rejects patterned theories of justice in favor of those that honor the choices people make in free markets. He argues that distributive justice depends on two requirements—justice in initial holdings and justice in transfer.8
The first asks if the resources you used to make your money were legitimately yours in the first place. (If you made a fortune selling stolen goods, you would not be entitled to the proceeds.) The second asks if you made your money either through free exchanges in the marketplace or from gifts voluntarily bestowed upon you by others. If the answer to both questions is yes, you are entitled to what you have, and the state may not take it without your consent. Provided no one starts out with ill-gotten gains, any distribution that results from a free market is just, however equal or unequal it turns out to be.
Nozick concedes that it is not easy to determine whether the initial holdings that gave rise to today’s economic positions were themselves just or ill-gotten. How can we know to what extent today’s distribution of income and wealth reflects illegitimate seizures of land or other assets through force, theft, or fraud generations ago? If it can be shown that those who have landed on top are the beneficiaries of past injustices—such as the enslavement of African Americans or the expropriation of Native Americans—then, according to Nozick, a case can be made for remedying the injustice through taxation, reparations, or other means. But it is important to notice that these measures are for the sake of redressing