Sources & Extracts

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Libertarians tend to stress the importance of formal liberties and formal autonomy. Critics of libertarianism have argued that a guarantee of substantive liberty or autonomy requires minimum resources in addition to formal liberty. Will Kymlicka describes the contrast this way:
What regime best promotes substantive self-ownership? Self-determination requires resources as well as rights over one's physical being. We are only able to pursue our most important projects, free from the demands of others, if we are not forced by economic necessity to accept whatever conditions others impose on us in return for access to needed resources. Since meaningful self-determination requires both resources and liberties, and since each of us has a separate existence, each person should have an equal claim to these resources and liberties.

But, if so, then the concern for self-determination leads us towards liberal regimes, not libertarian ones. Libertarians claim that liberal welfare programmes, by limiting property rights, unduly limit people's self-determination. Hence the removal of welfare redistribution programmes (Nozick), or their limitation to an absolute minimum (Fried), would be an improvement in terms of self-determination. But while redistributive programmes do restrict the self-determination of the well-off to a limited degree, they also give real control over their lives to people who previously lacked it. Liberal redistribution doesn't sacrifice self-determination for some other goal. Rather, it aims at a fairer distribution of the means required for self-determination. Libertarianism, by contrast, allows undeserved inequalities in that distribution -- its concern with self-determination does not extend to ensuring the fair distribution of the conditions required for self-determination. [Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, p. 124.]