LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Nozick: Works
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Nozick's belief in entitlement theory is a direct result of his belief in the absolute right of individuals to their own person, self-ownership, as it were. Therefore, wages a person earns from his labors are absolutely entitled to him. If the government taxes twenty-five percent of his wages, then, effectively, he works two hours per eight hour day without pay, which is akin to slavery. Nozick refers to the Kantian principle that individuals should be treated as ends in and of themselves, rather than means towards some other end. By taxing an individual's earnings, the government is, in effect, treating that individual as a means for some other goal, most likely the redistribution of wealth. This application of the Kantian ideal may seem suspect, as businesses treat employees as means towards profit and vice versa.
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Nozick was mainly a semilibertarian plutarchy theorist. He defends in his works so called "libertarianism" , which is in reality not libertaire, i.e. anarchist, but a semilibertarian, i.e. not significant authoritarian (more than 50% authoritarian degree), capitalism, i.e. more than 50% plutarchy, according to the anarchist economical political map. Thus, the systems he discusses are mainly not in the anarchist quadrant on the economical political map, but represents different forms of semilibertarian liberalism... called "New-Liberalism" and sometimes the "New Right".
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According to Nozick, taxation is equivalent to forced labour. Taking a proportion of earnings is like making a person work a proportion of his working time for another's purposes. It is unjust to force a person to work for another's benefit.
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That said, any reader of “Invariances” can gain from it a feel for the scope and tenor of Mr Nozick's thought. He writes in a recognisably American tradition of pragmatism and scientific naturalism. One of philosophy's main jobs, he says at the start, is to prepare topics for empirical science to go to work on. Yet the science he is drawn to is the speculative, intuition-defeating sort. He loved puzzles and free-ranging argument too much, you feel, ever to surrender entirely to the constraining authority of slowly accumulated fact.
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Nozick didn't have the *right* to waive the rent control law any more than an employee has the *right* to waive the minimum wage or social insurance protections or workplace safety standards. Kudos to him for doing his social duty by standing up to enforce that law, as distasteful to him as it must have been to do so in light of his personal beliefs.
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The remainder of the essays is devoted to topics treated by Nozick in his later work. In “Nozick on Knowledge and Skepticismâ€, Michael Williams offers a number of objections to Nozick’s influential account of knowledge, according to which a belief counts as knowledge just in case it “tracks the truthâ€, i.e., reliably covaries with reality across a certain range of close possible situations. Williams suggests that the most fundamental problem for Nozick’s account is one that it shares with other members of a family of theories that Williams labels “pure reliabilist theoriesâ€. Specifically, it treats the concept of knowledge
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