@ J.E. Dyer:
I didn’t want you to be silly alone, batwoman.

Now, Smidge, you’re just being silly. You know the 16th amendment was adopted.

and you probably would have gone around saying, ” good grief, an income tax is unconstitutional.”

Incidentally, I’m in the company of a whole school of economics in making my points about “redistribution.” This is hardly a radical interpretation, unless you consider Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, Sowell, Gilder, de Soto, and a number of others “radical.”

The economics texts used in 101 courses in college (there are basically two) take a Marxist view that accepts “redistribution” as a valid term, but free-market capitalist economists have been around for decades and are very widely known, and hardly a fringe group.

Good grief, of course I would have argued against Social Security when it was being proposed. Which was back in the 1930s, BTW.

I’ve spent a good deal of effort on precisely the distinction between redistribution, the political intent, and “redistribution,” the misnamed effect. In reality, there can be no such thing as “redistribution.” There are taxation, public expenditure, and theft. These are valid categories. “Redistribution” is a made-up term to try and mainstream theft by giving it a function in economics and — for some partisans — morality.

Neither wealth nor income is “distributed” in the first place. That’s why “redistribution” is an invalid term. You can’t redistribute what was never distributed.

Wealth is created, and income is earned. Income and wealth can be taxed, but they cannot be redistributed. Collectivism has proven this over and over again. All attempts to “redistribute” wealth and income simply cause both to shrink, and cause initiative and diligence to be replaced by politics and cronyism as the means of either getting enough to eat, or accumulating power over others.

It is 100% wrong to say that Americans have bought into redistribution, the political intent, because we have accepted taxation for Social Security and public assistance programs. We have most emphatically not done so. We have indeed assumed economic burdens with these public programs that have a discouraging effect on economic initiative — but it’s precisely because we have never crossed the political Rubicon of believing the “redistribution” fairy tale that we have continued to overcome the economic burden of public assistance entitlements.

If we do cross that Rubicon, we can kiss all our prosperity goodbye. There’s no other “America” out there to perform our economic role: to let the maximum number of people live in the greatest prosperity. The wealth will disappear, the pie shrink, and the great majority of people everywhere will live worse than they do now. Prosperity will revert to being the privilege of the few.

@ Barbara:
You know that verse in Revelation about how in the last days people will still be getting married? John might have added that the bureaucrats will still be having turf wars.

@ CK MacLeod:

I’m not sure we’re talking about the same kind of security. For the individual bureaucrat or for society as a whole? In theory, the most secure people on earth, job-wise, were the Soviets: everyone had a job and a pension, until there was no Soviet Union. Poof!

@ J.E. Dyer:
We need to distinguish “redistribution” the overt Marxist goal, and redistribution, the practical effect.

When the Government takes money, for whatever purpose, that is a transfer of wealth. It may be for excellent purposes, or ones that you judge excellent (military preparedness, say) but it still takes control of the money from one group and gives it to another. There may be safeguards and accountability that make Boeing and Grumman and Brown-Root produce what they are supposed to under contract, so you can say that the public is getting a product for its money (and a standing military, to boot) but a part of the cost of doing biz is growth of that entity Government, which invariably accrues power to disperse moneys, as well as to accumulate it, with less and less accountability to the people it’s taking the money from.

Social safety net becomes entitlement becomes a permanent generational transfer of wealth. Good intentions or no, mismanagement has made it so.