Here’s another issue that may divide libertarians from progressives. It is prima facie wrong to live off the productive efforts of others. That is, other things being equal, being productive is a virtue, while being unproductive while enjoying what others produce is a vice. Let us call this person a social parasite. The fact that a political arrangement encourages people to be social parasites counts against that arrangement. Notice that I say “counts against”: that fact does not necessarily condemn the political arrangement, because there may be countervailing reasons to tolerate social parasitism (such as alleviating poverty.) The best-known social parasite is the rent seeker. The rent seeker gains, not from market transactions, but from political (i.e. coercive) redistribution of resources in his favor. He is a social parasite. One difference between libertarians and progressives may be that progressives usually do not take social parasitism seriously enough when proposing political arrangements, whereas libertarians usually do.

The worry about government failure can be seen, not just as a concern with inefficiency, but as a moral concern about the use of the coercive machinery of the state to reap private benefits.  Social parasitism is unambiguously wrong, I think, when the parasites are rent-seekers undeserving of any transfers in their favor, such as (say) Wall Street firms. On the other hand, worries about social parasitism may be insufficient to condemn transfers in favor of poor welfare recipients, i.e. persons that may deserve the transfer under a plausible theory of justice. But even in this case it is appropriate to worry about the beneficiary’s becoming a chronic social parasite (this worry, I take it, informs the extensive national debate about welfare.)

In general, being a professional social parasite is questionable. Libertarians claim that redistributive institutions create exactly this perverse incentive.  The institutions under which we live crucially affect our life plans.  Under redistributive institutions, many people may form life plans to convince the government to redistribute in their favor. This life plan may be more profitable, and in many cases require less effort, than a life plan to produce goods and services for voluntary exchange. It may also be a life plan better suited to the parasite’s natural talents: his charm and cunning may well exceed his capacity for hard work.

Worrying about social parasitism steers analysis away from state coercion in the direction of moral virtue. Libertarians have independent arguments to limit state coercion, of course. That a political arrangement encourages social parasitism may be an additional reason to question the arrangement.  The focus on social parasitism may also illuminate political analysis. Robert Cooter has argued that in every society there is an equilibrium of producers and parasites. Societies do better when the parasites are not sufficiently numerous to stifle growth. Societies do worse when the opposite is true.  There are good and bad equilibria.

This very rough idea requires considerable refinement if it is going to work. For example, it presupposes the right to private property. If someone does not believe that anyone owns (morally) anything, then it wouldn’t make sense to say that some live off the productive efforts of others, because the wealth produced would not belong to those others in the first place. (Still, I suppose that in the socialist farm it would be wrong for some to nap while others work the land.) Another interesting problem is private charity. No one, I assume, objects to private charity. Yet the beneficiary is a social parasite in the sense I defined, because he lives off the work of others. Here I think that the fact that charity is voluntary outweighs the concern about parasitism. But even in this case, again, it would be objectionable for someone to become a professional beneficiary of private charity, to adopt social parasitism as a way of life.