I’m still working on a better expression for what we are calling “redistributionist” or “redistributive,” because you’re quite right: I didn’t offer one.

We do need something else to call it, in my view. And urgently. Since there is no true “redistributive” intention behind our entitlement programs, we do ourselves a disservice by letting the phenomenon be put in those terms. It weakens us in every debate.

The camel is a good 80% under the tent now, and swinging his camel butt around making the tent poles sway dangerously. It IS dangerous to embrace the redistributive idea, and think we can go for it whole hog and not destroy ourselves. So, either we’ve got to stop calling the transfers of purchasing power that we live with now “redistribution” — or we’ve got to hammer away at how “de facto redistribution” is, in fact, unsustainable, and has already made us all slaves to $90 trillion in unfunded entitlements.

I do understand your concept of the camel’s nose being in the tent. Truly his a$$ is all the way inside too. There still has to be some level of government, preferably of the limited type as envisioned by the Founders. Zero government is anarchy and your property can be defended individually from your front porch but no farther. 100% government is slavery. The scale is sliding perilously close to door #2.

According to this model, redistribution as envisioned by Obama and his ilk is possible only if the donors are forced to give in some continuous fashion (i.e., taxation) while receivers spend in any manner chosen, not matter how frivolous. The end result is a gradual destruction of society and the monetary system, which is at the mercy of people with no capacity to renew it.

Since we already redistribute, it won’t hurt us a bit if government decides it needs to start taking $300 a month to provide the same electric power to your home that you used to get for $150? It’s no big economic deal for government to decide that you need to spend 11% of your income on health insurance, because, after all, we’re already redistributing — government is already redistributing big chunks of what we earn, and hey, we’ve survived for decades under that redistributive concept, so what’s the big deal?

I’m not picking on you, GnuBreed, but I’m glad you set up this series of questions. I also have a quote from a left-wing reader of my Optimistic Conservative blog, which demonstrates better than I could that my concerns are valid. He responded to the above post with this:

I find it important that we use the term redistribution in the same way and to mean what it usually means. Anything else invites avoidable misunderstandings.
Additionally, I think that it’s of some importance to note that the US has somehow teetered along with redistribution as part of its architecture for long before we were born. Attempting to describe it as something radical and foreign, as something that this administration is somehow imposing to tear apart the fabric of our society isn’t sound.

I believe most on the right haven’t thought through the implications of accepting that we already “redistribute.” That acceptance eliminates the best arguments against the kind of “redistribution” being proposed by the Obama administration.

That’s one of the key reasons I won’t use the same word — “redistribution” — to describe both the operation of our Social Security system, and the intent of left-progressivists to level incomes, steal from the wealth of individuals, and “manage” or “direct” the size and character of economic sectors.

The other reason is that “redistribution” is inherently an illogical and meaningless word. Nothing we have is “distributed” to us from a Cosmic Toy Chest. It can’t be “redistributed”; it can only be taxed or stolen. “Redistribution” is a made-up concept that tries to mainstream theft, and give it a benign socioeconomic function.

And again, as I said in the original piece, this doesn’t mean I defend the way the SS system works. I don’t. The way our politicians have let the system work for decades, it operates as something between taxation and theft. It needs to be either overhauled or (my preference) sunsetted. What SS does NOT prove, contra my left-wing buddy’s comment, is that we can go along happily for decades with “redistribution” going on and it won’t do us any injury.

On not one single day since the inauguration of Social Security has that been the premise for it; and the same is true of Medicare.

Except that the first check was cut soon after it being enacted, to a person with NO contribution to the SS fund. Checks have been cut to many millions since then with little or no contribution. That IS redistribution no matter what else you want to call it. So premise (or promise) or not, the actuality has always been to redistribute from day one.