Schall on the Redistribution of Wealth

This is the best essay-length refutation of income redistribution I've read to date. It's just excellent. Not surprisingly it's from Schall. Read the whole thing here. Samples below:

Not a few enthusiastic politicians are eager to distribute wealth without much wondering where it came from, how much work it took to produce, or even what wealth is. The spiritual origins of wealth are the most neglected depths of the economic sciences, such as it is. The most important thing to know about wealth is that its source is not property, nor money, nor governmental confiscation. It is that is wealth is finally based on the human mind and its capacity to produce something that we need or could appreciate.
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The state’s function itself needs to be earned. It is not itself the primary object of what is produced. Taxes, that ancient and ever troubling reality of government power, were to provide the services that everyone needs in order that they might be productive. Disputes about prices and contracts happen. There are thieves and enemies. It is worth noting that Christ’s “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God’s the things that are Gods’” was originally occasioned by paying a tax.
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The original notion of distribution came from an Aristotelian notion. It was called “distributive” justice. Its focus was on a realistic awareness that those who did more, or contributed more, deserved more. It was a cause of revolutionary concern when those who were equal in some things thought they were equal in everything, a view related to envy, or those who were unequal in some things thought they were superior in all, a view related to greed. But there always had to be title to the distribution. Some do produce more, are more intelligent or qualified in many ways. Our very existence depends on the encouragement of many forms of excellence and the ways to encourage it through rewards of honor and support.

There is a long tradition that would say that if the government “equitably” distributes say one hundred million dollars of tax monies in equal shares to say ten thousand needier citizens, on a principle of “redistribution,” the most likely results would that all this money would simply disappear or end up in the hands of the most talented or most unscrupulous. Money does not do much good unless it is given to someone who knows how to use it and, more importantly, is self-disciplined enough to use it well. This is what loans and capital investment are about. Not without interest it is said that the biggest days at casinos, of which this country, thanks to a form of retributive justice to those we once were said to have conquered, has not a few, is when the welfare and social security checks come in.
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I have long meditated on a passage of Josef Pieper that seems pertinent here. Recalling Aquinas, Pieper says that the primary act of commutative justice (rendering to each person what is due) is “restitution.” It means that society is a huge web of individual exchanges that are constantly going on. Things new and old are being produced, redone, and exchanged on such a vast scale of personal choice and freedom that no central authority can imagine it. Pieper then adds the following passage:

If the basic act of commutative justice is called “re-stitution,” the very word implies that it is never possible for men to realize an ideal and definitive condition. What it means is, rather, that the fundamental condition of man and his world is provisory, temporary, non-definitive, tentative, as is proved by the “patchwork” character of all historical activity, and that, consequently, any claim to erect a definitive and unalterable order in the world must of necessity lead to something inhuman (Anthology, 63).

This view reflects the dangers when commutative justice, the vast exchanges of individual persons with others, is not understood.
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Redistribution is a covert formula of state control that in its effect takes the sources of wealth out of society and dissipates it. It thereby furthers the dependence of everyone on the state with no incentive or hope of ever escaping from dependence on the next “Redistribution.” And each Redistribution will have a smaller and smaller pot to redistribute because the causes of the “surplus,” as Rousseau called it, is stifled by a theory of state benevolence that is based on the notion that the reason the poor are poor is that the rich are rich. All we need to do is take from the rich and redistribute it to the poor and everyone will soon be equally what? Rich? Hardly. The logical end of such thinking is that everyone will be equally poorer, equally dependent on a state that has undermined the real sources and incentives of wealth among its citizens. The only way to help the poor and middle classes is to allow the whole society to increase proportionately, not to take from the rich and give to the poor.

It seems rather amusing, in the end, that the two men perhaps most responsible for the rise of unlimited modern state power would advise against taxing those who are most likely to produce what is needed by any society, including the tyrant in his own pursuits. Whenever the “inhuman” appears, it almost always does so under the guise of doing good for the people who, in the meantime, find themselves more and more beholden to him who redistributes what they need. What is received appears as something due in justice because it was taken away from those who had too much of it. It also, transformed by the taxing power, appears as the “gift” of the benevolent government who is generously giving us what we need rather than relying on us to do it ourselves.