16 FEBRUARY 2002, Page 32

The justice of inequality

From Mr Henry Cohen Sir: Alasdair Palmer's synopsis of the late Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia ('The price of freedom', 9 February) was enjoyable enough to make me want to reread the book.

But Mr Palmer concluded his essay with a logical error. From Nozick's assertion that it is wrong to use coercion to take from one person to help another. Mr Palmer somehow concludes that it is moral to take whatever one's power enables one to take. Nozick's point was that inequalities (or equalities) are acceptable if they have been created by a just process, but not if they have been created by coercion.

Henry Cohen

Maryland. USA