Chapter 2 of my new book, Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights (forthcoming by the end of the year), provides a concise moral justification of property rights, and then discusses the threat posed to them by eminent domain, regulatory takings, and zoning. Subsequent chapters explore equally consequential, but less blatant, assaults on these rights. In arguing that economic liberty is entitled to the same deference accorded other freedoms, I draw on the insights of Robert Nozick and F. A. Hayek, and I wish to very briefly focus attention here on a certain convergence in their thinking.
For Nozick, redistribution in the name of social justice is inconsistent with the respect due people as rational agents; that is, beings capable of discerning the moral law and formulating coherent plans for their own future:
Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities…This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. Just as having such partial control and power of decision, by right, over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 172) (his emphasis).
Because rational agency is the ultimate source of our special moral status, it is unjust to interfere with its exercise in this way.
Three decades in advance of Nozick, Hayek also elucidates a connection between property and autonomy:
Strictly speaking, there is no “economic motive” but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the “economic motive” means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends. If we strive for money, it is because it offers us the widest choice in enjoying the fruits of our labor. (The Road to Serfdom, 98).
In other words, the redistribution of wealth directly harms people by interfering with their plans and projects. If the subjects of such schemes did not value their property, it would have already been disposed of.
I should hasten to add that Hayek does not here or elsewhere defend personal autonomy as something valuable in its own right (although he seems to assume this as a given). Rather, he argues that secure property rights promote social welfare generally. But, in this passage he at least gestures towards the moral concerns voiced by Nozick.
