Robert Nozick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The argument begins with a simple challenge: suppose you have your favorite distribution of holdings — call it D1. Perhaps it is perfectly equal; perhaps it varies along whatever dimension you find morally compelling. Whatever it is, we stipulate that it is just, by your own lights.1 Now Wilt Chamberlain is a great gate attraction, and he signs a contract specifying that twenty-five cents from each ticket goes directly to him.
One million people attend his games over the season, each voluntarily dropping their quarter into a box with his name on it. He ends up with $250,000 — far more than anyone else. Is this new distribution, D2, unjust?2 It is hard to see how it could be. Each person in D1 was entitled to their holdings — you said so yourself, since D1 was your favorite just distribution.
Each of them chose freely to give twenty-five cents to watch him play. They could have spent it on candy bars, or copies of Dissent magazine. They converged on Chamberlain.3 If D1 was just, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2 by transferring portions of what they legitimately held, D2 is just too. What else were those holdings for, if not to do something with?
Third parties have no complaint. After the transfers, everyone else still holds exactly what D1 assigned them; no one's share has been diminished.4 The question that should stop the egalitarian cold is this: by what process could a voluntary transfer between two consenting persons generate a legitimate claim of distributive justice on the part of a third party who had no prior claim against either of them?5
The general lesson is stated plainly: no end-state or patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people's lives.6 Any favored pattern will be transformed, by ordinary voluntary exchanges and gifts, into a pattern the principle disfavors. To maintain the pattern, you must either prevent people from transferring resources as they wish, or periodically confiscate what others have chosen to transfer to them.
And if confiscation after some time is permissible, why permit them to keep the resources for any period at all? Why not immediate confiscation?7 The deeper point is about patterning itself. Things do not arrive in the world as manna from heaven, awaiting distribution by some central authority. They come into being already held, produced and transformed by people whose actions need not realize any particular pattern.8
There is therefore no separate process of distribution standing apart from the processes by which holdings actually come to be — and consequently no occasion for a patterning theory to do its work. The view that holdings must conform to a pattern has the consequence that people may not freely choose to act with things they legitimately hold, whenever those choices upset the pattern. Liberty upsets patterns. That is not a defect of liberty; it is a refutation of patterning.9
Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction... He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game, twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 176
Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2, unjust?Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 176
Each of these persons chose to give twenty-five cents of their money to Chamberlain. They could have spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Montly Review. But they all, at least one million of them, converged on giving it to Wilt Chamberlain in exchange for watching him play basketball.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 176
After someone transfers something to Wilt Chamberlain, third parties still have their legitimate shares; their shares are not changed.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 176
By what process could such a transfer among two persons give rise to a legitimate claim of distributive justice on a portion of what was transferred, by a third party who had no claim of justice on any holding of the others before the transfer?Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 176–178
The general point illustrated by the Wilt Chamberlain example and the example of the entrepreneur in a socialist society is that no end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people's lives.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 178–179
To maintain a pattern one must either continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually (or periodically) interfere to take from some persons resources that others for some reason chose to transfer to them. (But if some time limit is to be set on how long people may keep resources others voluntarily transfer to them, why let them keep these resources for any period of time? Why not have immediate confiscation?)Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 178–179
since things come into being already held (or with agreements already made about how they are to be held), there is no need to search for some pattern for unheld holdings to fit; and since the process whereby holdings actually come into being or are shaped, itself needn't realize any particular pattern, there is no reason to expect any pattern to result.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 234–235
The view that holdings must be patterned perhaps will seem less plausible when it is seen to have the consequence that people may not choose to do acts that upset the patterning, even with things they legitimately hold.Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 234–235