In an earlier post, I noted Robert Nozick’s criticism of the view that the state may tax us because we are in part ‘social products’. Much of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia reflects Rothbard’s influence, and this topic is no exception. As so often, Rothbard was there first, and Nozick did no more than restate his insights in more complicated fashion. In Power and Market, a work Nozick studied closely, Rothbard says: “It is precisely the process of the market by which the array of free individuals (constituting ‘society’) portions out income in accordance with productivity. It is double-counting to postulate a real entity ‘society’ outside the array of individuals, and possessing or not possessing ‘its’ own deserved share. If by “organized society’ he [ the economist Henry M. Oliver] means the State, then the State’s ‘contributions’ were compulsory and hence hardly ‘deserved’ any pay.”
