the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for… - Robert Nozick

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

These issues are very complex and are best left to a full treatment of the principle of rectification. In the absence of such a treatment applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify it. Although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might seem to be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them.

There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.