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Robert Nozick offered the following criticism of Rawls' difference principle:

If things fell from heaven like manna,and no one had any special entitlement to any portion of it, and no manna would fall unless all agreed to a particular distribution, then it is plausible to claim that persons placed so that they couldn't make threats, or hold out for specially large shares, would agree to the difference principle rule of distribution. But is this the appropriate model for thinking about how the things people produce are to be distributed? Why think the same results should obtain for situations where there are differential entitlements as for situations where there are not?

A procedure that founds principles of distributive justice on what rational persons who know nothing about themselves or their histories would agree to guarantees that end-state principles of justice will be taken as fundamental....But no historical principle, it seems, could be agreed to in the first instance by the participants in Rawls' original position. For people meeting together behind a veil of ignorance to decide who gets what, knowing nothing about any special entitlements people may have, will treat anything to be distributed as manna from heaven. [Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p 198-9]