Utopia, you are standing in it!

Tyler Cowen summarised Robert Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example, thus: a bunch of poor kids pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball. Wilt gets the money, the kids get to see the game. Wilt is millions of dollars richer by the end of the season and the kids poorer. Since we wouldn’t object to any one of these individual voluntary market transactions, why should we object to the resulting new distributional pattern of income and wealth? Is this new pattern unjust?

Robert Nozick argued that most notions of distributive justice would require a continual and unjustified interference in personal liberties to stop people undoing equality by trading with people such as Wilt Chamberlain. Individuals would be stopped from using the fruits of their talents, abilities, and labour as they see fit.

Isn’t it time to update and internationalise the Wilt Chamberlain example?

• A Scottish welfare mum decides to cheer herself up and write a book, going to local cafés to do so to escape from her unheated flat.
• The initial print run was 1,000 books, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries.
• J.K. Rowling is the first to become a billionaire by writing books.
• Every one of those book purchases was voluntary.
• Every one willingly gave up their money for her books.
• Is this new distributional pattern of wealth and income unjust?

G.A. Cohen twisted and turned to argue that the fruits of Rowling’s mind and willingness to work, in effect, belong to us all?!

How many more Harry Potter books would have been written if Cohen is right and his ideas applied about taxing the rich?

Are you willing to risk explaining your answer to the young and not so young fans of Rowling’s books about how it would be part of a better world for them that the additional Harry Potter books were not written?

Instead of just letting young people buy her books if they want them, we must put up with constant interference with people’s liberties to prevent injustices from J.K. Rowling’s royalties stream getting too high.

Liberty upsets patterns. Allowing individuals freely to use their equal wealth and income as they choose will inevitably destroy any distributional pattern advocated by socialists and egalitarians. If anyone evaluates how just this or that pattern of income and wealth distribution is based on how things end up, they must constantly support interferences with people’s liberties. That people having rights and resources have moral histories was central to Nozick’s attack on Rawls. Nozick rejected Rawl’s notion of resources and talents being collective assets to be assigned by a central distributor.

More and more of the top 1% of income earners these days are superstar celebrities, athletes and entertainers. J.K. Rowling and most top celebrities, athletes and entertainers get a pass on distributional injustices and growing inequality resulting from their membership of the top 1% of income earners. Why?

Philosophers do spend a lot of time arguing over whether we own our own eyes and thus can can take our eyes with us behind the veil of ignorance or whether our spare good eye instead should be left outside to be redistributed through an eye lottery to the blind. But if we own our own eyes no matter what, why not our other natural gifts, talents, good health and work ethic?

P.S. J.K. Rowling is a socialist who gave millions to British Labour. She would not be able to do that if the 83% top income tax rates of 1970s British Labour had applied. Maybe she would have been another of the legion of left-wing tax exiles such as in the 1970s?