one in six billion? or more?

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she did not choose to be handicapped and therefore there is no legitmate reason why she alone should have to bear the costs of this handicap.


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Nobody else decided to make her handicapped, so by *your own reasoning*, nobody else should have to bear those costs, either.


Notice the phrase she alone: we are all equally responsible for dealing with it, she has 1/6,000,000,000 of the responsibillity for dealing with it. Let us say that a disabled person who has not 'marketable' qualities starves to death because we (and by we I mean anybody who plays any role in creating or maintaining or benefits from that system i.e. everyone within the country's borders at least) create an economic system which does not allow us to tax anybody in order to ensure her survival when we could have created one where she survives: is this not highly unethical to you? Even if someone has no role in the creation of the system it is still generally agreed on that their is a duty to perform beneficience what it does not come at a great cost to us. responsibility for causing something and responsibility for dealing with the consequences of that thing are conceptually distinct.

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I strongly disagree with your assumption that these people are advancing "the rest of us".


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I didn't invent air conditioning, but my house is air conditioned.

I don't know how to build a car, but I have two of them in my garage.

I don't have a green thumb, but my kitchen is full of organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. I certainly don't know how to butcher a pig, but I was able to smoke a couple of racks of ribs yesterday.


Ok, so cooperation has economic benefits over trying to do everything on your own on a deserted island: obviously. But I think the powerful subjugate others more often than they liberate them, and the less talented benefit the talented by buying the products they make and working for them, thus providing them with profit and security. The inventors of these products need a market, and we are providing them with it: so the guy who invented air conditioning could not have made money off his invention without all of us to buy it nor all the people in history which increased technology and science to the point at which it was possible to invent an air conditioner and therefore it is not the case that he 'earned it' all by himself. So my phrasing is poor here but my point simply was that the less talented don't owe the talented any special favors for 'benefiting us'.

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Further, you said "You are the legitimate possessor of your talents, and are free to use them in accordance with your chosen talents" - but how can I be free to do what I want with my talents if others have claim to them? You claim that people can't be owned by others, but you also claim that people have legitimate claims to my production? How are those compatible?

First, note that I had made a mistake in wording there, as I posted two posts up from your post that I am replying to. And the pursuit of as much income one can accumulate regardless of the consequences for others, even if that leads to massive inequalities and uneccessary suffering, is not a justice respecting project, and interests/preferences which require the violation justice have no value at all and so the prescensce of illegitimate preferences cannot distort our claims upon one another. Justice limits the admissible conceptions of the good, so that those conceptions the pursuit of which violate the principles of justice are ruled out absolutely: the claims to pursue inadmissible conceptions have no weight at all. Because unfair preferences never, as Rawls put it, enter into the social calculus, people's claims are made secure from the unreasonable desires of others. Equality in resources (or at least a well-regulated and very limited inequality) is required for justice, therefore projects which require a violation of equality in resources are unjust and not acceptable; it makes no sense to say that preventing injustice is unjust.

Let us say we agree that murder is wrong (I think we do, for the record). Here is hypothetical to illustrate: Joe wants to murder Bob simply because of the way Bob looks and has the ability to do so. Assume two possible worlds: one in which Joe will kill Bob because there is no law against murder and one in which Joe will not kill Bob because there is a law against it. So the law/government prevents Joe from killing Bob and that has limited his ability to pursue his choosen projects. However, since Joe's project was unjust, it is surely morally better, not worse, that his project went unfulfilled. Sometimes the only or best way to ensure a moral obligation is fulfilled is to make a law against it, and when that is the case that is what we should do.

A claim on someone is different from owning them like one does a slave. What I mean by claim is the corollary of moral obligation i.e. saying the disadvantaged have a claim on the more advantaged is simply another way of saying the advantaged have an obligation to the disadvantaged. Those who are good at the market game should be legally free to choose their own job, for example. What they are not ethically free to do, nor should they be legally free to do it in principle (pretending incentives don't exist) is to demand that they recieve more money in exchange for working that job. Saying that somebody is not free to murder another person does not mean the person who is not free to murder is suddenly a slave.

Look, the 'talented' benefit in from their talent immensely outside of the market already, and the highest paying jobs are almost always better intrinsically and in terms of power than lower paying jobs anyway; the untalented people who work at a factory for $9/hr would generally much rather be an NBA Center or a lawyer for $9/hr (if the jobs paid that much) if they could: but they do not have that market power so they cannot do so. Why should we in principle have a system where those who already gain the most from the world gain even more? In fact some have made good arguments that the naturally/socially advantaged should in theory be paid less than those who are less advantaged.

Finally, the ability to be productive and to gain money requires far more than one's own talents. As I mentioned before, it requires the existensce of others to buy that product, science and technology created long ago, schooling etc. Most importantly, market exchanges require more than the exercise of self-owned powers: they also involve legal rights (or in an AC society we would have to say they have a moral right here to defend your position) over things , external goods, and these things are not just created out of nothing by our self-owned powers. If I own some land, I may have improved the land, through the use of my self-owned powers. But I did not create the land, and so my title to the land (and hence my right to use the land in market exchanges) cannot be grounded solely in exercise of my self-owned powers. Self-owned powers alone on an island without any natural resources will never get you anywhere will they?

Until you show that individuals have a moral right over things in general and the things they are using to make money in specific; a moral right to own them as well as there self-owned powers (neither of which you have shown), you have not shown that redistribution is morally wrong.

Indeed, there is a long line of libertarians sometimes called 'left-libertarians', from Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Leon Wallras in the 18th/19th centuries, and defended today by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne, who start from the premiss of self-ownership but recognize the insumountable difficulites in justifying unequal appropriation of the world, and so accept natinalization or equalization of resources, or compensation for those left propertyless.

And I don't seek to subjugate or cripple anyone: what I want is for everyone to have a fair share of resources and liberties with which to control the essential features of one's life; I want people to be EQUALLY free, I don't want some people to be more or less free than anyone else. Libertarians only want those with the ability to do well in the market to have real control over their lives. Self-determination for all is what I want, not just a few: and the market by itself provides it for only a few.

Taxation for redistribution will only seem to be 'subjugating' someone if it is morally wrong. Once we realize that redistribution is a required part of treating people as equals, then it will serve to promote, rather than attack, our sense of dignity. Furthermore, being subject to taxation on the rewards that accrue from one's undeserved talents does not seriously or unfairly impair one's substantive self-ownership-those who are taxed in the egalitarian planner still have at least a fair share of resources with which to control the essential features of their life.

Redistibution does not subjugate people or cripple people. It unsubjugates and uncripples those who being subjugated by the market.