Customer Reviews

Libertarianism without Inequality

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This is an imaginative, clever and deep discussion of central issues in political philosophy.

The argument centers around reconciling stringent rights to individual liberty -in the way philosopher Nozick construes them- with extensive redistribution of worldly resources. Otsuka's is a brilliant reconstruction of Locke's theory of resource-acquisition, and of the simultaneous moral pull of liberty and equality.

Since the book is cutting-edge in recent debates in moral/political philosophy, it contains little reference to practical politics or policy. Not for the intellectually faint-hearted.

I've read Nozick and Michael Otsuka is no Nozick. This book was a big disappointment. It's tedious and dull (unlike Nozick, with whom you may not agree, but whom you'll never find tedious or dull) and the arguments were the sort of thing I would expect from an eager undergraduate writing her or his very first essay in moral theory. I did not find Otsuka's effort up to the task of dealing seriously with the problems he addresses. The whole book is an exploration of the author's (not widely shared) personal intuitions, combined with a set of really strange and bizarre counterfactuals, which make the oddest and most marginal cases the central tests of political or moral theories. I have to say that I consider the time reading the book to be completely wasted. (And I should also point out that this rather thin book is really just some unrelated essays that have been stitched together into one volume; the essays on criminal justice ethics were silly and bore hardly any relationship to the topic promised by the title of the book.)

This book reads like a graduate thesis in philosophy, with the defects thereof. It cites and engages the works of earlier philosophers (notably John Locke and Robert Nozick), but lacks the analysis of real-life political controversies that would engage the general reader.

There is a long tradition of left-wing libertarianism (aka Anarchism, Bakuninism, etc.), centered on distrust of a centralized state. An Anarchist would never allow courts and police (assuming such existed at all) to defend contracts and property rights (the "watchman state" endorsed by anarcho-capitalists). Neither, however, would he prop up socialism with a Berlin Wall. (Such anarchism has worked in subsistence-level peasant societies [eg Nestor Makhno's districts in Ukraine, 1919-1920], but not in complex industrial societies.)

Mr. Otsuka's book did not acknowledge Anarchism apart from one brief reference.

Instead, his "libertarianism without inequality" sounds closer to what Fred Siegel, historian of John Lindsay's policy failures in NYC (1966-1974), calls "dependent individualism." In his first chapter, Mr. Otsuka posits a government strong enough to enforce an absolute equality of income, with supplementary income to handicapped who need it to achieve equal happiness. He hems and haws about whether the massive taxation required to enforce such equality would violate libertarian principles. His second chapter suggests a bizarre way to raise revenue: capriciously exorbitant fines against those deemed to have surplus wealth (eg, apparently, though he didn't use this example, a $1 million fine for dropping a sandwich wrapping). Mr. Otsuka did not engage political problems, eg incentives to perform well at demanding and/or unpleasant jobs, or the contempt of law that would be generated by unfair fines.

I did not read the rest of the book as closely -- two chapters on law enforcement and self-defense which sound truistic to a general reader, and three additional chapters returning to his idea of egalitarian "libertarianism."

The use of "libertarianism" in Mr. Otsuka's book title was bound to provoke American pro-capitalist "libertarians," aka "liberals" condemned by the Vatican and Latin American socialists. That draws it more attention than a more modestly packaged collection of philosophy essays, but is the extra attention really worth much?

Libertarianism without inequality is a powerful, rigorous response to Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (and several other positions as well). One is left wondering, however, how this philosophy could be implemented in practice - given the absence of perfect information and the resistance efforts to reallocate people's current natural resource holdings might provoke.

Just like any cheesy Marxist who is afraid to call themselves what they really are, this author tries to co-opt the word "libertarian" to reconcile unrestrained personal liberty with state "egalitarian" redistribution. The results are something neither libertarian nor all that Marxist/socialistic. The author is very good at selling himself on his own premises and then "coming" to conclusions with his strange examples.

Something that is never addressed in "egalitarian" literature is what exactly "equality" entails, (is it sameness?), or whether it is even possible to make us "equal" in every respect due to things like evolution and environmental conditions that affect and react to and promote human actions. These questions aren't even considered here.

The author, as well as every other academic philosopher, considers Robert Nozick THE SINGLE representative for a philosophical libertarianism. The author doesn't address any of the better philosophers of libertarianism like Jan Narveson and Tibor Machan -probably out of intellectual laziness, plus Nozick is easy to take down.

If you want more competent criticisms of libertarianism from a distinctly Marxist point of view, then check out G.A. Cohen's "Freedom, Self-Ownership, and Equality". If you want a criticism of Nozick's "Night-watchman state" then check out Murray Rothbard's "The Ethics of Liberty" and "For a New Liberty" -the precise book Nozick was arguing against in A,S,U.

This...it's trash. Don't waste your money unless your another intellectual who has to assure themselves of the things they already believe in.

First the socialists co-opted the word 'liberal;' now, this socialist is trying to steal the word libertarian from those who believe in individual and economic freedom. This book is an attack. It's an attempt to confuse away the freedom movement by robbing it of its labels. For a real definition of classical liberalism/libertarianism, visit lp.org. Also, there are plenty of real books on freedom in listmania on Amazon, just type 'libertarian.' To the statists: you may pervert our terms, but the power of truth and freedom will not be eschewed from existence.