Robert Nozick, a philosophy professor at Harvard, is the intellectual hero of libertarians. His book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, winner of the National Book Award in 1974, argues that "free minds and free markets" are the key to a successful society. While endorsing personal choice on social issues like drugs and pornography, Nozick mocked the economic interventionism of contemporary liberals who, he said, are "willing to tolerate every kind of behavior except capitalistic acts between consenting adults." Alas, it now appears that like so many other advocates of the free market, Nozick is willing to make one small exception --himself.
In September 1983, Nozick signed a one-year lease on a condominium apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, owned by Eric Segal, the eminent classical scholar and author of _Love Story_. Segal, who bought the place in 1972, has lived there only occasionally and now resides in England. The apartment is a beauty, actually two combined units with 2,500 square feet of space, a wine "safe", Jacuzzi, sauna, and a 50-foot balcony overlooking the Charles River. As a consenting adult, Nozick agreed to pay Segal $1,900 a month.
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Nozick knew he had not been the first tenant. Segal had rented out the apartment several times before to friends and acquaintances. After some investigating, Nozick turned up a couple in the building who house-sat the apartment for six months in 1976, without a lease, paying only $675 a month. In September 1985, Nozick's second lease expired. Even though he had no contractual right to stay in Segal's apartment, he did not want to move out. The interventionist state to the rescue once again! Under Cambridge's rent control ordinance, even a tenant without a lease is evictable only if the owner himself wanted to move into the apartment. Not only did Nozick stay put, but a month later he filed suit against Segal in Cambridge District Court. Nozick argued the rent --based on the $675 base figure-- should now be only about $800. He demanded a $25,000 refund for two years of "overpayment" --plus triple damages.

RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the "Core Principle of Ethics." One thing that I think reinforced the view that I had rejected libertarianism was a story about an apartment of [Love Story author] Erich Segal's that I had been renting. Do you know about that?
JS: I did hear about that. The story that had gone around was that you had taken action against a landlord to secure a certain fixed rent…
RN: That's right. In the rent he was charging me, Erich Segal was violating a Cambridge rent control statute. I knew at the time that when I let my intense irritation with representatives of Erich Segal lead me to invoke against him rent control laws that I opposed and disapproved of, that I would later come to regret it, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.