Is the redistributive tax legitimate? The Rawls-Nozick debate

While John Rawls defines the redistributive tax as an application of the principle of fairness that must compensate for inequalities between individuals, Robert Nozick likens it to forced labor. This 20th-century controversyth century is still relevant today.

In the 1970s, the debate on the role of the state between the American philosophers John Rawls (1921-2002) and Robert Nozick (1938-2002) culminated in the question of taxation. The latter emerged as the central part of the more general issue of social justice, the foundations of which Rawls laid in his work Theory of Justice, published in 1971. This complex work is built around a thesis that is easy to grasp:

«The circumstances of justice can be defined as the set of normal conditions that make both possible and necessary the cooperative