A question to Nozick while reading 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' is the following: Why be so absorbed by the startingpoint if we have no possibility to decide what has happened? How far back is our responsibility going? We see a lot of suffering in this world we are living in. Is that suffering something we can neglect if everybody that owns something are entitled to do that by previous legal transactions?
And when we consider those transactions not to be seen as legal, are we able to do an evaluation of that whithout looking at the present situation? It is when we compare the situation of the indians with the situation for those whose ancesters bought land from them with pearls of glass, that we feel the injustice. If the indians had lived in the richer strata of the society, there would have been no reason to talk about justice or injustice even if there were actions of fraud many years ago.
The only solution for Nozick is to say that the entitlement theory has to do with the state and its laws. Those whom suffer today but without a legal case, those people are the subject for the moral realm. We ought to do what we can to help people that suffer, Nozick may say, but that is a moral obligation not a legal one. (Maybe it is possible to view religious organisations as protecting agencies that have adapted to a role another than that of being a state.)
If you do not like the libertarian point of view, you have to ask why the distinction between those entitled by law to compensation and those not, why ought that distinction be legally relevant? Why not promote a legislation such as when you are in a certain situation you have a right to a support of one kind or another? Why does someone in the past have had to commit a crime for you to have a right to be helped to survive today?
It seems that Nozick as a philosopher, with many interesting questions, presents a view that allows an organisation of banks to expand the economy by credits. What people pay in taxes to the state, the protecting organisation, will then come back to them when this state invests or in other way redistributes the money. The firms that are benefiting from those activities are not run by those on welfare.
