Richard Epstein: "Robert Nozick Vs. The U.S. Congress"

In his latest weekly column for Forbes.com, Richard Epstein argues that the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are a result of Congress' over-reliance on "patterned principles" in making decisions:

Now that yesterday's market nosedive shows the disappointing Congressional bailout has not calmed markets, let the post-mortem begin. Disasters like this latest financial meltdown don't just happen. Mistakes this huge require an impoverished political philosophy to grease the skids. Fannie and Freddie didn't design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the "patterned principles" of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully in his 1974 masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Believers in patterned principles hold that there is some preordained social order that is more just than others. Accordingly, the function of the state is to use the levers of powers to manipulate behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. These patterned principles stand in opposition to historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes. For Nozick, the key rules were rules of justice in acquisition (to set up the initial property rights) and justice in  transfer, whereby those rights (and others derived from them) could be exchanged or combined through voluntary transactions.

Read the full article here.

Update: Thanks to "Stu" for pointing out the typo in the original title of this post.