From time to time, I find myself debating the merits and efficacy of redistributionist policies as a means of achieving social warfare welfare, equality, and justice. This particular argument has been simmering for about six months, but I think its time to get it out.

Central to my thesis is the belief that somewhere and somehow there must exist absolute property rights which are to remain inviolate; without which, we have what can only be described as varying degrees of serfdom. Lest for instance, those items to which you have legitimately acquired title – earned through toil or otherwise – are never really yours: Instead they are perpetually subject to the appeals to force or popularity. Whether such appeals have at their core, good intentions or deception is utterly irrelevant: what’s yours is not, in fact, yours, but rather belongs to others – once they decide they want to take it from you.

Under all redistributionist schema, is a total disconnect between what a man earns, and what a man might deserve – a certain group of people are deemed to “deserve” something by virtue of having not earned it – pardon the Ayn Rand in me speaking. This “something,” usually money, is always taken from those people who have earned it, or otherwise lawfully acquired it. What we’ve established here is that “if you earn wealth, it is yours.” But that’s not really a complete statement.

There’s a debate about inheritance, and whether it qualifies as something that the heir earned. Of course it does not. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a rightful claim to it. To posit that the heir of a fortune did not earn the fortune and therefore does not deserve it is to commit a logical fallacy of denying the existence of other rightful means of acquiring title to property, and it is a sneaky, distant-cousin of the labor-theory of value put forth by Marx and Engels. Even if this fallacy could be reconciled, it does not follow that others deserve it. This argument contradicts the proposition that only earned wealth is legitimate, and since the recipients of income transfer, by definition, are those who have not earned their own wealth, it would follow that whatever they receive from such programs is illegitimate. It boils down to the following:

If a man earns wealth, it is his.
Some men have wealth that they did not earn.
Therefore, others deserve it.

Well, I think we can see that this is a complete denial of property rights. Once earned, property belongs to he who earned it, and he may do as he pleases with it, by virtue of its being his. This could be burning it, or giving it to anyone he deems worthy, by whatever measure. “Earning” is not the only way to rightly acquire title to property, so we can explode the myth that all unearned wealth is undeserved or illegitimate. The argument eventually reduces to desert, and to equalization of opportunity, or to some other metric of social utility. But there is no objectively conclusive way to determine ex ante that a particular recipient is more deserving than all other possible recipients (or any other possible recipient).

So What?

Where would we start? Of course the answer is “taking property from some people in order that we may give it to others.” The question of why “we” are the arbiters of distribution is never really addressed. But let’s say that by some stroke of genius, we could implement a program whereby all people’s property holdings were unequivocally equalized.

What do you think would happen next?

Well, according to some, the rivers start flowing with lemonade and candy canes grow on trees and everyone lives in this fantastic utopia, happily ever after. If we could equalize everything tomorrow, it would only take a (relatively) very short time for imbalances to appear. This is due to the many natural inequalities among men.

It would not take long before those who demonstrated superior abilities were wealthier than some of their counterparts. It would not take generations before those who have a longer time-preference had amassed more productive capital than those who are hell-bent on spending every last dime of their weekly pay. It would not be but a few weeks (or less) for people – all of whom place a different and subjective marginal value on the infinite combinations of goods and services available in the world – had re-established inequality.

So there’s not much reason to assume we can do any better (whatever that means) than what we’ve got, and even less reason to believe that the world would stay that way for any appreciable length of time. Once we establish that this brand of “equality” is not attainable (because we don’t, and perhaps more importantly, cannot know how things ought to be distributed) nor sustainable, we can begin to understand that it’s nothing more than theft – albeit a vigilante theft. And like other vigilante mobs, well, nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a lynch mob, and so social warfare ensues, political power and dominion increases, and individuals lose a little bit more of what makes them individuals; they lose a little bit more of what makes meaningful, cooperative society possible, and they lose a little bit more of their sense of self-reliance, brotherhood, and charity.