I have started on the fourth section of Eric Mackay’s book Libertarianism, dedicated to economic justice and property rights. Like the third, it consists of a short introduction and two chapters showing the views of Nozick and Hayek on the subject—apparently, for Mackay, there are no other libertarians worthy of attention on this issue (though this is likely because Mackay is writing a book on philosophy, not on history, economics, or law, which explains the selection of authors).

The chapter on Nozick examines how he tore into supporters of distributive justice, showing that to achieve some ideal end-state, they would have to launch a mechanism of permanent revolution, and to apply some single distributive model, they would have to reduce everyone to partial slavery. Nozick opposes this redistributive ecstasy with the libertarian approach well known to us, according to which the justice of a particular property right depends on the procedures by which it was acquired, rather than on the size of the property or, for example, the degree of the beneficiary’s loyalty to the party line.

I express my deep gratitude to everyone who sent in donations for the translation of this chapter; now we can start collecting for the next one. And while the money for Mackay (or for Molynneux, you love Molynneux, don’t you?) is being collected, I will return to Friedman; a chapter on the laws of the Chinese Empire awaits us.