(socioeconomic rights) must be abandoned as impossible. There is no reason to suppose that there are not enough resources in the world, say, to feed, house, or provide basic medical care to everybody in it, as Articles 11 and 12 of ICESCR require. 2 8 The difficulty is that there are also other demands on these resources-other fiscal priorities and other uses that individuals and firms might have for the income and wealth that would have to be taxed or otherwise accessed if fiscal capacity were to be increased. If it did follow from scarcity in this sense that we should abandon some subset of the demands that are placed upon scarce resources, then we would need to hear arguments back and forth about which subset of demands this should be. For example, weapons and military demands compete fiscally with demands for socioeconomic provision. Why not abandon the former rather than the latter? I do not mean this as a rhetorical question. I mean to ask for an answer and to ask also for the hard work-including hard work in our theory of justice-that would be necessary to explain and defend a given answer. These points are particularly important when it comes to thinking about the relation between socioeconomic claims and property rights. The alleged impossibility of socioeconomic claims-the difficulty with the idea that ought implies can-is often based on an assumption that the existing distribution of property is to remain largely undisturbed. When a conservative government in the West says, for example, in response to some plea for welfare provision, "The money simply isn't there," what is usually meant is that it would be impolitic to try and raise it from existing income earners by taxation. But if resources are scarce relative to human wants, any system of rights or entitlements will seem demanding to those who are constrained by it. If an economic system includes provision for welfare assistance, that may seem overly demanding to taxpayers. But if it does not include that provision, then the system of property rights in such an economy will seem overly demanding to the poor, requiring as it does that they refrain from making use of resources that they need in order to survive. As usual, the question is not whether we are to have a system of demanding rights but how the costs of the demands are to be distributed. Robert Nozick may be guilty of a fallacy along these lines when he voices the following general misgiving about socioeconomic rights 2 9: The major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these "rights" require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No 28. 29. 784 See G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI) A, supra note 2, at 50-52. The remainder of this Part is adapted from Waldron, supra note 10.