There Is No Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition

Summary

Cohen's views aside, a weak link in Nozick's case might nevertheless be thought to reside in his theory of property rights-rights, that is, to resources external to oneself. Self-ownership may well rule out taxation of earnings from labor, as Nozick insists and as Cohen allows; it may thus doom any scheme of eliminating inequalities in wealth and income arising from prior inequalities in labor-enhancing personal endowments. Still, insofar as there are also inequalities in wealth and income that derive from inequalities in initial holdings in external resources, the egalitarian may be thought to have a toehold, for even if it is granted that you own yourself and your talents, labor, and the like, it is another question whether you own anything else. If it can be shown that you do not own, or at least do not fully own, those external resources that you have utilized in exercising your self-owned powers to acquire the wealth you possess, then the question of the redistribution of some of that wealth via taxation would appear to be reopened.

Nozick's theory of property rights has three components: the principle of justice in acquisition, which concerns the way in which previously unowned resources can justly come to be owned; the principle of justice in transfer, which concerns the way in which one might justly come to own a holding previously owned by someone else; and the principle of justice in rectification, which concerns the way in which past injustices in acquisition and transfer are to be corrected.