Abstract
Is an ideal of distributive justice, strong enough to require some redistribution, philosophically defensible? More, could such an ideal be made politically attractive? While it looks as if redistribution inevitably conflicts with property rights, and while property rights have great popular and political appeal, it is argued here that property rights are, in fact, hard to defend philosophically. And what can be defended has indeterminate, even open ended, content. Indeed, a strong argument for redistribution is that, unless property is qualified in such a way that it does not automatically rule out redistributive taxation, property cannot be defended.
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Notes
- 1.
Two recent books got me started: Barbara Fried, The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard, 1998; and Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership, New York, Oxford, 2002.
- 2.
See his Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1974 esp. Ch. 7.
- 3.
That property actually limits liberty is an idea that Hale shares with later theorists like Allan Gibbard, in “Natural Property Rights,” Nous, 10, 1976, 77–85.
- 4.
Fried, 50.
- 5.
Fried, 37. Nozick’s well-known paper on coercion is a more recent attempt. See “Coercion,” in S. Morgenbesser et al., eds. Philosophy, Science and Method, New York, St. Martin’s, 1969, 440–472.
- 6.
Coase argued, of course, that different allocations of rights are equally compatible with (Pareto) efficiency. But that does not affect the claim that they have different distributional consequences. See Murphy and Coleman, The Philosophy of Law, Totowa, NJ, Rowman & Allenheld, 1984. ch. 5.
- 7.
One might object that the implicit distinction between justifying ownership and justifying the specific “incidents” of ownership is somewhat strained. I agree. We can’t do the one without doing the other.
- 8.
The property rights most assiduously defended by conservatives were not rights to use, but rights to sell—rights to the income from selling property or product. Hale thought price, and so exchange value, is driven largely by demand, rather than cost of production (effort). At least this is true enough that marginal product, as measured by sale price, is not a reliable indicator of effort. Fried, 108–111, 133.
- 9.
As noted, Hale and other progressives might have said it augments liberty. But it is not obvious that it does so. Neither is it obvious that the regulation of some rights automatically creates new rights. It may just promote the general welfare. See H. L. A. Hart’s “Bentham,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1962. Pp. 314f.
- 10.
M&N argue that the second is redundant. If we have already decided that the rich should be taxed twice as much as the poor, there cannot be a further question of whether two poor persons, say, should be taxed differently. For that would then violate vertical equity. 13–16, 37.
- 11.
The following remarks largely follow M&N’s discussion, pp. 16-19
- 12.
One thinks of Henry George’s “single tax” movement or of more recent proposals for “flat” taxes or for switching from an income tax to an expenditure tax. Each is presented as a panacea. M&N discuss some of these, e.g., pp. 99–103, 130f.
- 13.
Think about arguments about different degrees of strict liability in the law of negligence.
- 14.
See Murphy and Nagel, p. 60, on the moral incoherence of common sense rationales for property. Nozick’s critique of desert-based rules of property makes the same point. 1974, ch. 7.
- 15.
I have said several times that institutions—from property to, I would now add, an active legislature—are to be justified by their good consequences. If justified, they, together, vastly improve our lives relative to some preinstitutional baseline. The question of justice is not the question whether these consequences are optimally realized. They never will be. Constraints of justice, like Rawls’s, will specify something like specific, minimal conditions on the legitimacy of coercive institutions. Whether they can be improved upon beyond that will always be a matter of dispute.
- 16.
Revised Edition, Cambridge MA, Harvard UP, 1999.
- 17.
For example, because it does not claim that certain distributive patterns are good in themselves, it does not invite the sarcastic question whether, in the state of nature, we would have to impose a certain distribution, taking from one hunter-gatherer to transfer to another.
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Nelson, W. (2013). Property, Taxes and Distribution. In: Stacy, H., Lee, WC. (eds) Economic Justice. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4905-4_12
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