Interesting thinking by Stephen Metcalf about liberty and Libertarians.
Robert Nozick, father of libertarianism (Slate Magazine)
Just as Nozick would have us tax every dollar as if it were earned by a seven-foot demigod, apologists for laissez-faire would have us treat all outsize compensation as if it were earned by a tech revolutionary or the value-investing equivalent of Mozart … . It turns out the Wilt Chamberlain example is all but unkillable; only it might better be called the Steve Jobs example, or the Warren Buffett example. The idea that supernormal compensation is fit reward for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue of neoliberalism, holding firm since the 1980s. …
Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. “According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life,” a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, “would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included.” Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.
There are evidently mis-reads and errors in the piece (that the Global Policy Journal, Cato, and others discuss—without really getting to the meat of the arguments), but Metcalf highlights realities that are often evaded by the advocates’ theoretical descriptions of liberty. He makes a more extended analysis of the Wilt Chamberlain example, centered on his argument, implied above, that we be wary of the implication/assumption that “all capital is human capital”.