Jardine, do you honestly believe the likes of Buffet and Gates, and the traditional Sultan of Brunei *deserve* to have upwards of $40,000,000,000 each, while almost half the world's population live on less than $2.50 a day?
No one chooses to be born. Gates did no more to earn his intelligence and flair for computer programming, than half the world's population earned the right to be born poor.
Out of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live (and die) in poverty. Meanwhile, in 2005 there were less than 500 billionaires in the world, who collectively owned over 3.5 trillion dollars (US).
UNICEF estimated (2006) 25,000 children (under the age of 5) die of poverty related causes every single day.
You ask me to justify re distribution?
Tell me how you justify distribution.

Grim
Let’s assume it comes down to what you or I think others deserve. And let’s assume that we think no-one deserves an unequal amount, for reasons of equity.

So then we would be justified in confiscating any amount over an equal amount, and donating it to others to re-establish equality.

You can see, can’t you, that that would cause the destruction of human society? And that it would not be fair either? Quite apart from being impossible in practice?

You may say that that example is too extreme.

However any lesser redistribution is different only in degree, not in kind. The necessary effect of any forced redistribution is both to create greater poverty and unfairness, not less, for the following reasons.

The high incomes of entrepreneurs, investors, sportsmen, etc. have got nothing to do with moral deserving, nothing to do with their intelligence, nor even talent itself – millions are more deserving.

Their high income is a result of one thing only: they have been able to adjust the factors of production so that *judged from the point of view of the masses as consumers* the result is better in providing them satisfaction or removing dissatisfaction.

Poverty is the original and universal condition of mankind. The process by which the Gates and Buffets become wealthy – profit - *is the same process by which the masses have sovereignty in directing the allocation of capital to satisfy their most urgent needs.*

If you don’t understand this, you should stop until you do.

The poverty of the poor is not because the rich of this world are taking what the poor would otherwise have. It is because of traditional or modern belief systems retarding, or suppressing, the capital accumulation that is the necessary and only process that could relieve it. (An increased quota of capital increases the amount that can be produced with the same inputs.)

A classic example is Burma: traditionally poor, then the wealthiest country in south-east Asia under the British, and now people are starving after 40 years of modern socialist redistributionism.

The collectivist error is collectivism: to look at society's income, as it were, from a God’s-eye point of view. This is to misunderstand human society itself.

The utopian is not God. Society is not a decision-making entity. People are not vast herds of animals owned by governments, to goad them into a better configuration. What drives the process of increasing wealth is individual liberty and people’s *unequal* valuations of what they are exchanging.

The economic ignorance of the redistributionists is a throw-back to the pre-modern moralism when people thought the valid function of authority was to stop the evil of more efficient businesses out-competing inefficient businesses, stop the wickedness of people from accumulating wealth, and stop sinful people from lending money at interest.

Antiseptic
Karl Marx’s theory of in Capital was, in a nutshell, that modern capitalism lowers the masses’ standard of living to subsistence level.

This has now been disproved both in theory and in practice more times than anyone could possibly want. Yet Marx’s error lives on - especially in third world dictatorships and academia in the western world.

The idea that, in the absence of forced redistributions, there would develop this vast desperate underclass at the level of subsistence, originates in Marxist theory, and is precisely back-the-front.

It’s the other way around. It is the accumulation of capital under modern capitalism that causes the general rise in the standard of living. It is the poor who have always benefitted most from capitalism, with its mass production for the masses. Any process that retards capital accumulation, makes conditions worse for everyone *but especially the poorest*. Capitalism de-proletarianises the workers, turning into hobbyists and café-goers, opera buffs and overseas travelers, the class that used to be peasants and subsistence labourers – us!

All
Yes, there will always need to be some provision for the poor; and the wealthier we are, the more we can and will provide. But it should be always by voluntary means – contractual or charitable.

Forced redistributions are self-defeating *when considered from the standpoint of the redistributionists*, as well as completely unethical.

Jardine,
I am not sure why you repeat your argument about bodies. I do not assume that you own your body when writing to you, only that you are embodied. Indeed, were our property convention different, so that you could own a body, you might not own yours. As it is, in Australia, you cannot own your body—nobody can.
If you are your brain, then embodiment is a relation of whole to part. If you are your body, then it is a relation of identity. If you are a soul, it is a relation of inhabiting. None of these is a relation of ownership.
Unless you are a soul (or some such), your continuing existence depends on your body continuing to exist. Because you have value, your continued embodiment matters. But I do not have to assume that you have value in order to write to you, only that you will continue to exist and will be able to and will read what I write.
Embodiment is not ownership. Were we to permit slavery, you might not own your body. But I could still write to you.
You have been misled by a fallacy of equivocation. (Philosophy is hard.)
Notoriously, debates between the proponents of the major moral theories have not led to a single outcome. In spite of some centuries of debate, we have yet to produce a fundamental moral principle which is free of exceptions. But that does not mean that no progress has been made. Deontological theories have been developed and changed since Kant. Rights have been prioritised, basic principles have been related to one another, contractarian approaches have been made more sophisticated. Aristotelian theories have expanded and reorganised the list of kinds of human flourishing, have developed sophisticated accounts of what is a intentional action and have developed methods of ethical analysis of problems which deal with some of the difficulties they face.
Utilitarianism also is not what it was. It has long been an objection that it rationalises harming an individual for the sake of the majority.

It would imply that we could be justified in killing unloved unemployed beggars, for instance, in order to use their organs to save and enrich others. Utilitarians therefore have accepted that they must include the wider social and long-term consequences of actions in their calculations. In the case of the beggar, if we consider the effects on society of it being known that doctors will occasionally kill someone to use their organs, we will see that the overall consequences are bad—people will be terrified, those suffering infectious diseases will flee from hospitals, and so on—and these things will produce a decline in happiness.
This process is enough to remove much of the arbitrariness of assertions about fundamental values. You have to accept not only the value, but the logical consequences of accepting that it is fundamental. If they are obviously immoral, the choice is mistaken. God does not cut the mustard.
To disprove your theory about property, Jardine, I must show not only that it implies that some actions which are clearly wrong are justified or mandatory, and/or that some actions which are clearly mandatory are not required, but that modifications of the theory which will meet the objections destroy the priniciple assertion (that the sole fundamental principle is that people are entitled to keep their property).
I note that you are now saying that we may not offend against the person or the property of others. That is an interesting change—to two values instead of one. Which matters most? When they conflict, which must give way? What counts as an offence against the person? And why do I assume that such offences are wrong when I write to you?
Some problems for the property only view. How are we to distinguish the cases where preventing suicide is justified from those where it is not? Why is causing pain to someone (when the body will recover) morally worse than destroying the vegetables in his garden? (Assuming he won’t starve.) Why should we require a older person in a lifeboat to give up their place to a child?

Ownership, however called, entails the right to use and possess. If someone is to have the right to use or possess, the question is only who, that is all.

When the state denies that self-ownership exists, that merely means they intend to forcibly substitute their decisions on the use or possession of a person for that person’s own: “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” They take the fruits of one labour using force or threats by taxation, require obedience, and imprison for refusal.

All that you have said involves appeal to absent authority or assumes what is in issue. The quibblings of academic philosophers are hardly a recommendation. Almost all of them are government-funded to start with. They have a direct interest in cheer-leading for the supposed prerogative of the state to exercise ownership rights over others, on which depends the payment for their comforts, privileges, and remuneration above the market rate for their skills. They are in the same intellectually compromised positions, as regards their interests, as were the high priests to Pharoah. Their habitat in the ‘universities’ discredits: they are home to every kind of intolerant illiberal ideology, and it is to their ever-lasting disgrace that they are the last bastion of orthodox Marxism and its protean variants, long after this dreary slave philosophy of all-knowing government has been disproved in theory and practice over and over again.

From the original right of self-ownership, follow the rights of freedom of movement, association, to provide services, and to enter into consensual transactiosn: in other words, all property rights and other human rights derive from this basal right.

The fact that other characteristics or faculties co-exist with self-ownership is not an argument against self-ownership, and involves no equivocation. The argument is consistent throughout.

By contrast, nothing that you have said has established a superior right in anyone else to the use or possession of the individual; and if you had, that itself would undermine your own standing to make the argument, leading again into an appeal to absent authority.