Libertarian justice — property and freedom

Libertarian justice, as articulated by Nozick and others, holds that justice is a matter of process rather than outcome — that a distribution is just if it arose from free exchange among consenting persons, regardless of how unequal the result. On this view, redistribution is a form of theft; the only legitimate role of the state is to protect property and enforce contracts. The framework has significant internal consistency and correctly identifies the importance of individual liberty; its difficulty is that it treats initial property distributions as though they were uncontaminated by historical injustice — which, for most real economies, they are not.