Query from a reader Down Under:

I’ve read your recent post Is Taxation Theft? When It Is and When It Isn’t (Monday, 09-08-2025).  You suggest that although the government has its own proper work, this doesn’t include redistribution.

This is a dividing line in our thinking, because I believe the government is good at many great things, including such as providing certain goods through redistributing wealth through taxation.

Of course, this must be done according to law and not against constitutional limits, but the New Deal justices have answered that question pretty satisfactorily in my mind.  Comments?

Reply:

I agree that the government provides certain goods, but I don’t think it is “good” for government to provide something which someone else can provide better.  For a single example – one with which I think you will agree – suppose the government took over all child care in the name of “helping families” and “relieving them of their burdens.”  This would be dreadful.  I am fond of the anecdote (it happens to be true, but I won’t name names) about two people running for office.  One said, “No bureaucrat can love my children as much as I do.”  The other, a social worker, said “That’s not true.  I love your children just as much.”  The former replied, “Tell me their names.”

The government doesn’t do a good job of providing even those goods which it ought to provide.  Among other things, government is wasteful, because bureaucracies like to enlarge themselves, and they have no incentive to keep costs down.  Some economists suggest that whenever the government provides a good, the cost of providing it is about twice as much as when other parties provide it.  This has come to be called the “rule of two.”

I’m not certain whether your second paragraph means that whenever government taxes, in effect it redistributes wealth (which is of course true), or that redistribution of wealth as such is a good thing (with which I disagree).

A difficulty lies in the ambiguity of the word “redistribution.”  If by redistribution you mean simply helping those in need, I’m for it, although I think the most conspicuous efforts by government to help those in need have made them worse off rather than better.  What the working poor need are jobs, not handouts which destroy their self-respect and encourage permanent multigenerational dependency.

But if by redistribution you mean taking from those who have something just because they have it, and giving it to others just because they don’t, this is exactly what I criticized as the Robin Hood fallacy.  It is theft, and yes, unfortunately the government is very good at it.  We have a real moral duty to look for opportunities to help those in genuine need, but we should not confuse the needy with the merely wanty.  There is no moral duty to make everyone the same, and it is not even a good idea, because it destroys initiative.  Look what happened to the Soviet collective farms.  People became more hungry, not less, because they received the same dole no matter how hard they worked.

By the way, the data show that although progressives claim to be more compassionate, conservatives give a lot more to charity.  What progressives mean by compassion isn’t that Paul helps out Sam, but that Peter puts his hand in Paul’s pocket and gives Sam what he finds there -- and the government is Peter.

As to the justification of the administrative state by the courts of the New Deal, I applaud your desire to act only through law, but sometimes what the government calls a law can be in a deeper sense unlawful.  The New Deal justices carved out a place for the administrative state by throwing out the “no redelegation of delegated powers” rule, which said that if one party delegates a power to another party, the second party must not turn around and give it to someone else.  Formerly it had been held that since the people delegated the rulemaking power to the legislature, the legislature couldn’t redelegate it to executive agencies.  That old understanding makes perfect sense to me.

Moreover, it had always been held previously that the combination of all three kinds of power, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same set of hands is “the very definition of tyranny” – those are the words of the great Constitutional architect James Madison.  But executive agencies do combine all three kinds of power.  They make rules, they execute rules, and they conduct their own judicial proceedings under the rules they draw up.

You would like to believe in both a republic and an administrative state.  I think you can believe in one or the other, but not both; you have to choose.  Ultimately, the administrative state destroys the republic.  It is the political tyranny of a single class, the class of experts, under the guise of not being political at all.