LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Nozick: People
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Nozick did not address all these questions in detail. He candidly acknowledged that his book was an "unfinished" argument. But he was clear on the main point: It is no more the business of the state to distribute wealth than to distribute mates for marriage. All efforts to redistribute wealth (for example, by taxing the rich for the sake of the poor) involve interference in people's lives.
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Nozick claimed that any government which forcibly taxed rich people and redistributed their wealth to help poor people was violating the liberty of the rich. Governments, he argued, had no right to encroach on the rights of individuals by taking their money and giving it to others. Governments shouldn't act like Robin hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor.
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At the base of Nozick's political theory in ASU, by contrast, is, as you correctly point out, Kant's principle of autonomy: people are ends in themselves, not merely means. (And, although I admit that I am less well-versed in Kantianism than in most other approaches, I believe that Kant thinks we develop our autonomy by accepting his Categorical Imperative because it allows us to determine moral law according to our own individual reason). And it is from Kant's principle of autonomy -- to oversimplify -- that Nozick deduces the Lockean principle of self-ownership.
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Nozick said little about how people acquire the property to which they are "entitled." He referred to Locke's famous theory that individuals are entitled to claim as private property those objects that incorporate their own labor, provided there is "enough and as good left in common for others." Nozick saw problems in that theory, but did not develop an alternative.
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