Somewhere down the line, I would like to do a larger treatmeant on the works of Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, et. al. I am struck by the curious tendency in a certain strand of Libertarian thought to start off on shaky ground. Perhaps it has something to do with the need for first assumptions. Whatever the reason, these arguments quickly break down when they confront that monster of all political doctrines known as reality.

Take the observation that individuals should be treated as autonomous, self directing, self reliant beings, capable of making decisions as consensual beings. At first blush, there seems nothing objectionable about this, although it is unclear what we are to do with this suggestion. For straightaway it is apparent that whole swathes of people do not fit this categorical definition – children, the mentally and physically incapacitated, the special care needs of the elderly, the infirm, the dying in need of hospice.  The ideal is forced to confront the undeniable realities of pre-existing social, economic and biological injustices built into a historic process. It is useless to try and make individual autonomy the metric by which political systems are built because it excludes and prejudices in a way that the blind justice of Rawl’s attempts to resolve.

Thus Nozick’s rather curious decision to redistribute and remedy injustices ex ante the social contract. One could be forgiven for suspecting Anarchy, State, and Utopia is just a clever joke on Liberalism itself. The assumption, unstated, is that the true arc of any political order (it’s natural state) will necessarily lead to inequality and injustice. Any attempt to remedy and address these are as useless as returning to the Garden of Eden. Worse, they involve the same sorts of cruelty and violence – impounding property, state coercion, the redistribution of wealth.

I remain unconvinced, or rather these arguments, convince me that individual autonomy, well intended, is a useless starting point precisely because it presumes a given distribution of power when the point, after all, is how power is distributed in the first place.