Nozick wants to make it appear that laissez-faire institutions are natural and define the baseline distribution which Rawls then seeks to revise ex post trough redistributive transfers. Nozick views the first option as natural and the second as making great demands upon the diligent and the gifted. He allows that, with unanimous consent, people can make the switch to the second scheme; but, if some object, we must stick to the first. Rawls can respond that a libertarian basic structure and his own more egalitarian liberal-democratic alternative are potions on the same footing: the second is, in a sense, demanding on the gifted, if they would do better under the first-but then the first is, in the same sense and symmetrically, demanding on the less gifted, who would do much better under the second scheme.

Thomas Pogge, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 23, no. 3 (Summer, 1994), p. 212