Editing Justice (section)

====Property rights====
{{further|Libertarianism|Entitlement theory|Constitutional economics}}
{{Unreferenced section|date=February 2018}}

In ''[[Anarchy, State, and Utopia]]'', [[Robert Nozick]] said that distributive justice is not a matter of the whole distribution matching an ideal ''pattern'', but of each [[Entitlement theory|individual entitlement]] having the right kind of ''history''.{{cn|date=February 2025}} It is just that a person has some good (especially, some [[Property rights|property right]]) if and only if they came to have it by a history made up entirely of events of two kinds:{{cn|date=February 2025}}
* Just ''acquisition'', especially by working on unowned things; and
* Just ''transfer'', that is free gift, sale or other agreement, but not theft (i.e. by force or fraud).

If the chain of events leading up to the person having something meets this criterion, they are entitled to it: that they possess it is just, and what anyone else does or does not have or need is irrelevant.{{cn|date=February 2025}}

On the basis of this theory of distributive justice, Nozick said that all attempts to redistribute goods according to an ideal pattern, without the consent of their owners, are theft. In particular, [[redistribution (economics)|redistributive taxation]] is theft.{{cn|date=February 2025}}

Some property rights theorists (such as Nozick) also take a consequentialist view of distributive justice and say that property rights based justice also has the effect of maximizing the overall wealth of an economic system. They explain that voluntary (non-coerced) transactions always have a property called [[Pareto efficiency]]. The result is that the world is better off in an absolute sense and no one is worse off.{{cn|date=February 2025}} They say that respecting property rights maximizes the number of Pareto efficient transactions in the world and minimized the number of non-Pareto efficient transactions in the world (i.e. transactions where someone is made worse off). The result is that the world will have generated the greatest total benefit from the limited, scarce resources available in the world. Further, this will have been accomplished without taking anything away from anyone unlawfully.{{cn|date=February 2025}}