Wilt Chamberlain: Liberty against Equality
Nozick · Anarchy, State, and Utopia · 1974
Start from a society where wealth is distributed exactly as you judge just, in equal shares if you like. A much-admired basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain, offers his games; a million delighted spectators each freely drop a small coin to watch him play. By the end of the season he has become far richer than everyone else. No one was wronged, each gave what they wished, and yet the fine equality of the start has vanished.
Is this new inequality unjust? And to correct it, would we have to forbid people from freely using what belongs to them?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Egalitarianismattacks the position
Maintaining an equal distribution requires forbidding free exchanges without end: liberty upsets any imposed pattern.
- Start from a distribution the egalitarian judges perfectly just, equal if you like.
- Each person, of their own free will, slips a small coin to someone they admire, a player, an artist; in the end that person is far richer than the others, without anyone having been wronged.
- If the starting point was just and each transfer free, at what moment would injustice have arisen? To restore equality, one would have to undo these exchanges, hence forbid people from using as they see fit what is theirs.
Therefore So to maintain a pattern of distribution is to have to control people's lives without end: liberty upsets patterns.