Frankness About Wealth Redistribution

When taxation is part of government, wealth redistribution goes hand in hand with it. Taxation was what feudal systems used so as to pay rent to the monarchy. The monarch, after all, used to own the realm. All of it. So just as owners of apartment houses, monarch's collect rent from those living in there. The meaning of this is that members of the population got to live in the country by permission of the government, be that a tzar, king, pharaoh, caesar or some other ruler who had nearly absolute power to run the place. It is still so in many regions of the globe. The people aren't deemed to have rights, including private property rights. That emerged late in the history of Western politics, mainly within the philosophy of the Englishman John Locke and his followers. They defended the idea of natural rights against those who championed the divine right of monarchs. With the American Revolution the Lockean system started to be implemented, though by no means fully. This abolished serfdom or involuntary servitude but didn't quite manage to abolish taxation, namely, the confiscation of people's resources, although in principle that should have followed the revolutionary turn of events. If citizens own their lives − have an unalienable right to life −they also own the fruits of their labor. (And such fruits did not need to be created by them from scratch as Mr. Obama suggested with his misguided remark, "You did not build that.") More