I am reblogging part 15 of my review of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” The post below covers the first of ten sections of Chapter 4 of ASU, where Nozick poses “the problem of independents” — a problem that could potentially derail Nozick’s entire libertarian project. To the point, how should a private protection racket deal with non-members? On the one hand, non-members or “independents” retain their natural rights to punish anyone who violates their rights, but at the same, what if the rights-violator belongs to a private protection association himself? Who wins?
Nozick (pictured below) presents an important theoretical problem in the first subsection of Chapter 4: the problem of independents, or how should a private protection racket deal with non-members? Additionally, Nozick raises a further theoretical problem in a footnote (p. 55): What happens if a non-member’s land is completely surrounded by land owned by members of a protection racket? How can the non-member leave his land to make a living without trespass, i.e. without violating the natural rights of his neighbors? See, for example, Parcel “L” pictured below. (For what it’s worth, Nozick says that he will address the surrounding-person problem in Ch. 7.)
Recall from previous chapters that, according to Nozick, people in a state of nature will establish “mutual protection associations” to protect their natural rights and that these protection rackets will compete with each other for clients until there are just few dominant agencies left, via…
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prior probability 