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Nozick, Taxes, and Property

J.R. Kearl

• Brigham Young University, Utah

“Do Entitlements Imply that Taxation is Theft?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 7 (1977): 74–81.

Robert Nozick's argument (In Anarchy, State, and Utopia) that taxation is theft seems erroneous. Contra Nozick, entitlement theory does not imply that it is wrong to forcibly tax wealth beyond the sum necessary to budget the minimal state's enforcement agencies. Marginal productivity theory weighs heavily against Nozick's view.

The argument runs as follows. An efficient allocation of resources under a market price system requires private rather than common property rights. Common property would encourage waste because thereby the costs of using a resource are not individually allocated (i.e., they are borne in common by no one in particular). Therefore, the creation of private property generates additional productivity by increasing the efficient use of scarce resources.

Next, without protection associations no agencies would exist to define such private rights, and property will remain held in common. Hence, organized protection agencies generate a scarce resource, the privatization of property, which in turn increases production. These protection agencies, then, are entitled to the surplus produced by the scarce resource that they create. This surplus may legitimately be transferred forcibly by them from some individuals to others needing help.

So, entitlement theory seems to allow for the kind of coercive redistribution that Nozick attempts to argue against. This argument, if valid, justifies far more extensive activity by a judicial and enforcement apparatus than Nozick wishes to concede.