Why Don't Libertarians Support Redistribution? (Part 2)

In my previous post, I explained why libertarians who are hardline deontologists reject redistribution. You have a duty to provide low-cost aid, but the duty is not enforceable. But other libertarians do endorse an enforceable duty of aid. Still, endorsing this duty does not yet get us to an endorsement of real-world redistribution, as I’ll explain.

Some libertarians are moderate deontologists (think Michael Huemer). They endorse the standard bundle of libertarian rights but deny that these rights are absolute. To motivate this idea, consider my mashup of Bruce Willis movies: Willis is a grizzled New York detective who plays by his own rules. As it happens, he needs to get to NASA immediately to prevent an asteroid from destroying the planet. The problem is, he doesn’t have a car. So he hotwires a BMW and speeds away to save the world.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that he did the right thing, even though he didn’t respect the car owner’s property rights. (As an aside, it’s not clear to me that even someone like Nozick would disagree—after all, he does suggest that rights may be violated to avert “catastrophic moral horror,” and this scenario probably qualifies.) Property rights, then, may be overridden to prevent sufficiently bad outcomes. Or maybe they’re limited in such a way that the confiscation in this case doesn’t even count as a wrong at all.

Even if the world isn’t at stake, violations of property rights can be justified to save a single life. Take a scenario inspired by Peter Singer. A child is drowning and the only way to save her is to toss her a life preserver. But you’d have to steal the life preserver from a warehouse. It seems as though you should do it. (Maybe you owe the owner compensation, but you should steal it even if you can’t compensate them). Here again, property rights aren’t absolute.

This is a plausible way to think about rights in general, not simply property rights. Take body rights. Suppose you’re confronted with a trolley problem. The trolley is headed toward a person trapped on a track. If you don’t pull the lever and switch the track, she’ll die. But another person has their foot stuck in the other track, so if you pull the lever, you’ll lightly bruise one of their toes. Here you should pull the lever to save the life even though it means violating someone’s body rights. The point is that granting that property rights can be overridden doesn’t establish that property rights are somehow weaker than other kinds of rights.

Why, then, doesn’t a view of this sort justify real-world redistribution? The answer, in brief, is that (virtually) none of the state-compelled redistribution that takes place in the real world is analogous to the confiscation involved in the life preserver case. (See chapter 7, section 2 of Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority for a more detailed defense of the following argument.)

If Americans were taxed to provide funds for, say, the Against Malaria Foundation, then maybe we could get the analogy to work. This sort of redistribution would provide an extraordinary, life-saving benefit for people in severe poverty. But that’s not the sort of redistribution that the US government undertakes. To give you just one example, the biggest item in the federal budget is Social Security. Even if you think that Social Security is beneficial on net, it’s not clear that it is so beneficial that it justifies a violation of property rights. Plausibly, you wouldn’t be justified in robbing the somewhat richer neighbor to your left to top off the retirement fund of the somewhat poorer neighbor to your right, even if the robbery was beneficial on net.

Now, it’s possible that some of the redistribution done in the United States is so beneficial that it justifies a violation of property rights. But investigating that possibility is beyond the scope of this post. The point is simply that we cannot move straightforwardly from the claim that violations of property rights are justifiable in principle to the claim that the violations of property rights involved in real-world redistribution are justifiable.