Robert Nozick on Enron, 'Friends' and Wilt Chamberlain

Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher who passed away last month, was a thinker of remarkably diverse interests — from free will to the Russian revolution. But Nozick will always be remembered for a single great book, the libertarian treatise, "Anarchy, State and Utopia." And that book, in turn, will always be remembered for its insightful discussion of professional basketball.

Now, it's not very often that political philosophy finds itself covering the same topics as ESPN SportsCenter. Yet basketball was at the heart of Nozick's argument against the liberal idea that justice demands the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. Indeed, until Nozick, virtually every political theory included arguments as to precisely what a just distribution of wealth would look like.

In his 1974 masterwork, however, Nozick asks us to imagine that our preferred scheme of wealth has already been put into practice. This can be any distribution you like — perfect equality, ownership of everything by political philosophy grad students, whatever. After this distribution, it turns out that one of us is really good at basketball. And I don't just mean that kid who always beat you in schoolyard one-on-one. I'm talking Michael Jordan here. In the seventies, when Jordan was still just a schoolyard one-on-one champion, Nozick used the example of Wilt Chamberlain.

But Wilt the Stilt, as you will recall, was always pretty busy with the ladies. So suppose the Stilt decides not to play at all unless everyone agrees to give him a quarter. Everyone immediately pays up, since we would give almost anything to see the man in action. (In action on the basketball court, you sickos. Though, since this was the seventies...)

Anyway, the result of all this is that everyone's happy as a clam, no injustice has been done, but your dear old income distribution has been shot straight to hell. After all, Wilt Chamberlain is now orders of magnitude richer than everyone else. Sure, the government might take Wilt's money and give it back to its original owners, but then he'll just refuse ever to play again. And isn't depriving countless basketball fans of their freedom and happiness a far greater injustice than letting one person get rich? Yet if there's nothing objectionable about the Stilt's millions, then there's nothing morally obligatory about your initial distribution of income.

Today, though liberals still dominate academic political philosophy, it is Nozick's world that we're living in. Just this past Monday, for example, it was announced that the cast of "Friends" would be getting a million dollars each for every episode of the show next season. That may sound shocking, but since so many people are willing to sit through so many commercials to see Chandler and Monica's antics every week, Nozick would argue that there's actually nothing here to object to.

Living in Nozick's world, however, isn't all slam-dunks and laugh tracks. As Brad and Jennifer hit the town to celebrate her big raise, Ken Lay, the former CEO of Enron, was taking the fifth before Congress. And Enrongate has a lot to do with what Nozick left out of his thought-experiment, what happens after wealth becomes highly concentrated in the hands of a select few. If the Stilt were to rise head and shoulders above the rest of us in wealth as he already does in height, he could pay someone to chauffeur his lady friends around, hire someone else to cook his dinner, maybe even bribe a congressman to vote for the sort of laws he likes. Money, remember, is power, and power corrupts.

The result is Enron — essentially an elaborate con pulled by the already rich to make themselves even richer, a con only made possible because the Texas oilmen behind it bought enough government influence to get exactly the sort of energy-trading regulations they wanted. The obvious solution, of course, is effective campaign finance reform and an end to legalized bribery. Yet even McCain's modest and ultimately insufficient attempt at reform barely squeaked past the Republican House leadership; anyone who imagines that Tom DeLay was acting on principle here needs a long visit with the Counseling Center at McCosh. We all know who usually calls the shots in Washington today: the Wilt Chamberlains of the world and their hired-gun lobbyists.

This is not to deny the power of Nozick's original thought experiment. If nothing else, it convincingly demonstrates that utopian schemes for the redistribution of wealth are impossible, and that inequality is here to stay. Even for those who strongly disagree with his libertarian convictions, Robert Nozick thus remains a source of real insight into our shared political condition. And I hear he had a mean jump shot, too. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.