Nozick and Libertarianism

Prolly not a good idea to post drunk, but then again if your drunk you dont have good ideas

I highly recommend you stay away from Nozick. I am familiar with Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia”(found a copy in a library before), I have skimmed over sections a couple of times, and I would have say that it is not a very historically informed book calling any form of capitalism an anarchism is something someone who is historically uninformed or ideologically motivated would say. I remember running through the bibliography and finding no actual anarchist texts, and the only text on socialism was das kapital which he only read to critique.
If I recall correctly, he seems to be really into Austrian economics...

regarding state and property rights and the state....
-there is already a lot wrong with property rights from a socialist stand point....
-Marx has a whole bit on property “rights” being far from neutral things. I am not a Marx man so I cant help you there, but libcom has a lot of peeps familiar with marx
-Marxians also have a very nice bit on how Capitalism needs the state to force people into the market/capitalism, for example: anti-loitering laws, I highly recommend you look into that
-if it helps your argument, there have been a few economic anthropologists(Karl Polanyi and David Graber, Kropotkin has also said it too) that have argued that state and capitalism are the same thing, the state control vs private control dichotomy that dominated American politics(and “capitalist” anarchists) being bullshit

all I can help you with mate....

you probably have this already but Jerry Cohen wrote a critique of Nozick called Self Ownership, Freedom and Equality in the nineties. Cohen had his faults but I seem to remember him nailing Nozick pretty effectively

oh and hope the hangover not too bad

Posting drunk is a top idea.

Man, all my best libcom posts have been the drunk ones!

One way I see around Nozick's minimal state, once you have assumed it (for which there is no reason, as there are a good number of arguments undoing his argument before he makes it out of the gate), is to undermine his argument for property itself. Once you show that property as conceived by him is illegitimate, you can then go on to show that a socialist, or an anarchist-socialist (perhaps you'd like to avoid "libertarian-socialist"), not finding his conception of property justifiable would, in his state, be forced to acknowledge and abide by an institution s/he wouldn't otherwise in order to keep others who do acknowledge this institution from taking over what socialists view as "common". You'd have to develop this argument yourself, but you could anchor your critique of his conception of property in chapter 3 of Alan Carter's book, "The Philosophical Foundations of Property Rights", in which Nozick's claim to property is shown to be unjustifiable.

Another way would be to use the age old argument against his justification for vast inequalities (for which Rawlsians are best known for, but you can perhaps use G.A. Cohen): that allowing vast concentrations of property in a small number of people, e.g. capitalists controlling health care facilities, would result (and here's where you switch it up a bit) in that particular good being distributed in accordance with the principles of the owner (in this case capitalism); therefore, socialists won't be able to distribute said good according to socialist principles. This would lead to socialists being forced into a market economy to buy healthcare, i.e. throwing away socialism entirely, or doing without healthcare and living in their "utopia" (neither of these two options sound like socialists would in fact be able to live out their utopia). Again, the argument itself would have to be worked out of Rawls or Cohen, although I vaguely remember Rawls, or some Rawlsian making a similar argument.

I'm sorry if that isn't much help. When I read this last night I tried to formulate an answer using Carter's State-Primacy theory (which stems from G.A. Cohen's Techno-Primacy theory), but because of Nozicks reduction of the state to essentially a police force, I couldn't use it for anything beyond trivial non-arguments...