The Case For Income Redistribution

When we lived in Guatemala many years ago I used to see a car with a bumper sticker that read, "Taxation Is Theft".  Apparently the owner was a person whose belief in property rights trumped everything. 

Hypothesis I:  There is a God and it cares about property rights.  If this is the case then one needs only to seek revelation, either one's own or someone else's.  I leave the search for such revelation to the reader who accepts this hypothesis.

Hypothesis II:  Either there is no caring God or if there is, it doesn't care about property rights.  This is a far more interesting hypothesis as it allows for thought and discussion of the topic.  By income redistribution I mean government policies and acts that redistribute between citizen groups.  Any given policy would occupy a point along a continuum running from unfettered private individual ownership of everything to collective ownership of everything. It is not my intention to identify any such point, but merely to justify government actions intended to move a society along the spectrum in the direction of collectivism. 

First the other side,  There are strong arguments for private individualized ownership of stuff.  They have to do with incentives.  If you get to keep the fruits of your labor or innovation there is much more incentive to work hard and or innovate, than if what you generate is shared equally among all. The same applies to the husbanding of resources.  There is little reason to not shoot the last pair of mating buffalo if, because they are commonly owned, someone else will.  The absence of defined and enforceable property rights in the air, the oceans, etc. can be seen as a major factor in the abuse of these resources.

And finally we arrive at my point.  What right has society collectively to take any disproportionate share of Bill Gates wealth from him and pass it on go someone else?  If it was legally earned by creating big social benefits, how do we slackers who created less and earned less get off taking away some of his?  And my answer is, because he did not gain this wealth individually. He was able to gain it because he was embedded in a society of people.  If her were not, if he lived and worked alone, though he might have physical control over all of North America,  he could not live at much more than a subsistence level.  He may have contributed enormously to the group, but he also gained enormously from being in the group.  That is the ethical reason why he may be taxed more heavily than others.

P.S.

I see that, measured in paragraphs, the introduction is four times longer than the sole point.