“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note that in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent holds less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p percent (where p is vastly greater than n), and so forth. They proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered.”
– Robert Nozick, noting how the presumption of equality of wealth as a just default position is widely held and rarely challenged head-on.
Anarchy, State and Utopia, page 232. The book’s second section, in which Nozick demolishes egalitarian ideas about equality and what he calls the “patterned” approach to justice in holdings, is in my view the best bit of the book, and enduringly influential on many classical liberals, libertarians, etc, to this day. The book was published in 1974, and Nozick was a Harvard academic at the time. (Proof that the 1970s was in some ways a fertile time for good ideas, and Harvard was in better shape than today.)
