Property Wrongs

Can property exist without the state?

Leigh Jenco from the May 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

More important than criticizing their argument, however, is realizing that its framework is shared by other thinkers who exert a powerful influence on social policy. Many people calling themselves liberals now believe that the expansion of state power is the driving force of civilization, something to be encouraged, not feared or too sharply limited. Stephen Holmes even goes so far as to claim that statist liberalism, not libertarianism, does more to advance the classical liberal project of eradicating power imbalances wherever they occur, adding with relish that this especially includes the place dearest to libertarian hearts, the sphere of "private" market transactions.

Murphy and Nagel are right that tax law is saturated with issues of justice, and they are right to insist that any fiscal policy must be backed by a coherent and defensible system of justice. Property is a moral issue, and libertarians should see welfare state theories for what they are: challenges not necessarily to market competition, which provides important and empirically verifiable benefits that Murphy and Nagel acknowledge, but to the value we may justifiably assign to those benefits.

In other words, those who sympathize with the authors' libertarian sparring-partner must construct an argument for liberty on moral grounds, or risk academic -- and political -- irrelevance. It is no longer enough simply to demand a right to be left alone, when rival theories of justice are calling the origin and status of that very right into question.

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