In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick seeks to demonstrate that principles of justice in acquisition and transfer can be applied to justify the minimal state, and no state greater than the minimal state. That approach fails to acknowledge the critical role that forced exchanges play in overcoming a range of public goods and coordination problems. These ends are accomplished by taking property for which the owner is compensated in cash or in kind in an amount that leaves him better (...) off (by his own lights) than before the transaction. Forced exchanges use coercion to form the state, but the just compensation requirement guards against redistribution state imposed redistribution for collateral purposes. Once these forced exchanges are allowed to form a state, then they may be used thereafter to justify the powers of taxation and eminent domain used to support infrastructure (roads, sewers, public utilities) that neither the minimal state nor private markets can supply. Footnotesa I have benefited from comments at the workshop at the Social Sciences Division of the California Institute of Technology. My thanks to Justin Herring and Eric Murphy, The University of Chicago Law School, for their usual capable research assistance. (shrink)

I.WhatVintage ofCivilRights?In this paper I wish to compare and contrast two separate conceptions of civil rights and to argue that the older, more libertarian conception of the subject is preferable to the more widely accepted version used in the modern civil rights movement. The first conception of civil rights focuses on the question of individual capacity. The antithesis of a person with civil rights is the slave. But even if individuals are declared free, they are nonetheless denied their civil rights (...) if they are unable to own property, to enter into contracts, to make wills, to give evidence, and to sue (and be sued) in courts. With all these civil rights claims, the target of the individual grievance is the state; it has denied large classes of individuals the formal capacities that it recognized and protected in others. The Civil War was fought largely over slavery. In its aftermath, civil rights claims protecting individual capacity received explicit, if imperfect, statutory and constitutional protection. The postbellum protections didnotguarantee these rights in absolute fashion – that is, in a way that would not be susceptible to abridgment under any circumstances. Instead, civil rights were protected in what might be called a relative fashion: whatever rights of this sort were enjoyed by white citizens were to be enjoyed by the newly freed black citizens as well. (shrink)