Robert Nozick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Self-ownership is the thesis that you own yourself — your body, your labor, your capacities — in precisely the way you own any external property. The implications follow with some force. When patterned principles of distributive justice are built into law, what they actually do is give each citizen an enforceable claim to some portion of the total social product — a product generated by individuals laboring, by people organizing production, by those who saved to bring means of production into existence.1
The claim is independent of whether the persons whose activities are being claimed upon ever entered into relationships generating those claims, or voluntarily took them on through charity or exchange.2 That is the structure worth attending to: your labor becomes something others hold a right to, not because you gave it, but because a distributional pattern demands it.
Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.3 If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve, apart from your own decisions.4 That process of taking the decision from you makes them a part-owner of you — it gives them a property right in you, in exactly the sense that having such partial control and power of decision over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it.5
Self-ownership is simply the denial of that condition. To own yourself is to hold that no one else has that enforceable claim on your hours, your labor, your body, without your consent. The taxation argument follows directly: whether it is done through taxation on wages, seizure of profits, or some large social pot where the flows are obscured, patterned principles of distributive justice involve appropriating the actions of other persons.6
The procedural disguise — wages taxed rather than hours conscripted — is not a moral difference. It is the same relation dressed differently.
When end-result principles of distributive justice are built into the legal structure of a society, they (as do most patterned principles) give each citizen an enforceable claim to some portion of the total social product; that is, to some portion of the sum total of the individually and jointly made products.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187
Each person has a claim to the activities and the products of other persons, independently of whether the other persons enter into particular relationships that give rise to these claims, and independently of whether they voluntarily take these claims upon themselves, in charity or in exchange for something.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187
Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187
If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187
This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. Just as having such partial control and power of decision, by right, over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187
Whether it is done through taxation on wages or on wages over a certain amount, or through seizure of profits, or through there being a big social pot so that it's not clear what's coming from where and what's going where, patterned principles of distributive justice involve appropriating the actions of other persons.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 186–187