God. Real. Right.

The closer an election, the greater the shallow promises intended to convince a few more voters toward one side or the other. Since by definition the majority of people are not wealthy, many of those shallow promises are aimed at the middle class and lower. “We will not raise taxes (or we will lower taxes) for anyone making less than $xxxx.” But promises are not the only way to win a middle-class heart. There are also attacks on a minority, in this case the wicked people who make more money than they do. “Greedy corporate executives have abused the free market and they ought to be punished.” Never mind that it is not greed, but the success at acting on their greed which actually aggravates the critic’s audience. That is, there is no political bounty to be had by attacking those who are greedy but fail to gain wealth through it: only those whose greed brings them wealth face the criticism, revealing the hypocrisy of a criticism motivated more by its disdain for wealth (or even profit) than for greed.
But back to the point: even a cursory analysis of those attacks extrudes a multifaceted problem with the redistribution of wealth. As a matter of definition, taxing the wealthy at a higher rate than others is redistribution of wealth. It is taking money from people who earned it and giving it to those who did not. Any redistribution scheme depends on limiting the reward for greedy behavior. That effort alone will suffice to establish the fact that redistribution schemes fail, why they fail, and why they are either immoral or morally ironic.
The essence of capitalism is economic egoism. That is, an entrepreneur “undertakes” in order to profit. While that claim may sound like an admission of guilt, it is not. It is no more necessarily wrong to seek profit than to want to eat. Both are egoistic (self-ish). But neither is wrong simply because it is egoistic. Indeed, as Adam Smith and David Hume point out (along with every intelligent economist since), anyone’s profit in an economy is a benefit to everyone in the economy, not only because their profit is itself the indicator of how much what they produced was worth to the economy, but also because their profit will not sit in a mattress, but instead become the means for purchasing and investing from others who will profit and purchase from others who will profit, and so on. So, “a rising tide floats all boats.” (Yes, the original, I believe, is “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but I like the assonance of “floats”.) Bluntly put, if people are not motivated by their own needs, pleasures, and desires, the economy will grind to a halt. Fortunately, people are not easily separated from their needs, pleasures, and desires. That fact is not a feature of capitalism but of life in the real world. Obviously, promoting an economy with redistribution requires somehow changing this core human motivation. Back to that attempted transformation in a moment.
But first, it is critical to recognize the difference between greed and the profit motive. A person pursues profit as a necessity means to his needs, pleasures, and desires. So the profit motive can be described as inherently egoistic (although, by extension of the argument below, it is not necessary to describe it that way). In truth, needs do not actually fit the category of what is satisfied by profit, since as a need it would be subsumed under expenses. So the profit actually comes down to what is used for pleasures and desires. Those two things sound suspiciously similar, but there is an important distinction between them–one pointed out by Joseph Butler. While all pleasures are desires, it is not the case that all desires are pleasures. More precisely, Butler speaks of pleasures as egoistic desires. But there are also altruistic desires; that is, human beings have a built in mechanism for caring unselfishly for others, even in direct contrast to their egoistic desires. (By the way, without such a mechanism Christianity as it is described in passages like Matthew 16:24-25 would be impossible to practice.) In the economy, that altruism can show up not only when a person decides to use his profit for the benefit of others but also in his potentially intense motivation to pursue the profit to begin with. So it is simply wrong to identify the profit motive with egoism or selfishness. Greed is the improperly selfish pursuit of profit.
Now the inherent rational, motivational, and moral failures of redistribution should be fairly obvious. First, it is consummately naive to believe that people will stop being economically motivated by their needs, pleasures, and desires. In addition, since people are behavioral, the less reward there is for productivity, the less productivity there will be. (I don’t believe people have to be behaviorally driven, but they generally are, and people who will disagree with the argument here are more likely to believe people are behaviorally driven anyway, so it still makes the point.) Hence, as people see their profits (which are a means to their desires–whether egoistic or altruistic) decrease, so will their motivation for productivity. So the only possible result of “redirecting” motivations toward, for example, “the general welfare” or the “motherland”, is decreased productivity. (There are other possibilities, like acting outside the economic norm–that is, criminally–but those possibilities are even more counterproductive to redistribution than decreased productivity, so the argument is unchanged.) And decreased productivity means everyone shares less in the economy.
But secondly, and this observation is the real killer for the foolishness of redistribution, it inevitably fails toward those who are creating what are considered problems in a capitalist system. There is no problem in a capitalist system, in a free market, when people are making massive profits because they want to be responsible citizens, contributors to the general welfare, and even benevolent to the needy. And there are plenty of capitalists so motivated. Perceived problems in a free market come from those who only pursue profit for their personal pleasure—for their egoistic desires. But that fact presents quite a conundrum for those who would enforce the redistribution of wealth. As it turns out, the very people who are causing the problems—the greedy—are the ones whose motivations will not be changed by government policies redistributing their wealth. The greedy will not become suddenly altruistic because the law takes their money and gives it to the poor (or worse yet, bureaucratically expensive programs to help the poor). So the only possible result is that the greedy become less productive. On the opposite end, altruistic capitalists will also be stifled in their pursuit of profit. In a free market, they pursued exactly what they believed would help others. It would take a miracle on par with resurrection for their motivation for a government program to match their motivation for what they had personally committed to give to, establish, or support in behalf of others.
The final observation is ironic to say the least. If programs of redistribution take these contradictions into account and try to do something about it, they will be forced to do what most people who advocate them would find ridiculous: the legislation of morality. Greed is immoral. Altruistic profit is not. So what a redistribution scheme must have in its plan is the ability to redirect the motives of producers. If it fails to instill new values it is inevitable that the economy will continually decline (and increasingly so as producers’ rewards decline and decreasing resources for redistribution force even more severe declines in the rewards). But such a redirection (even though impracticable anyway) would literally be the legislation of values, the legislation of morality!
So those who are egoistic will produce less in a system of redistribution despite the government’s oddly ironic effort to legislate morality on them. And the altruistic will produce less in a system of redistribution (barring a zero-waste bureaucracy and universally-appealing public programs) than they did when they were redistributing their abundant wealth voluntarily and contributing to an overall upward spiral in productivity.
No, the only way to meet the needs of the entire economy and best provide for those who are least cared for is to maximize the relationship between productivity and reward and legislate and regulate only in defense of that relationship. In such a free market, the altruistic will be maximally productive because of the fact that their profit will help others, the egoistic in spite of it. Any other approach is irrational because of the contradiction of wanting more for the poor but producing less for them to have, is impractical because of the impossibility of changing the motives of the only ones who are causing “perceived” problems, and is morally repugnant for replacing conscience with government policy and morally inconsistent for replacing the values of some with those imposed by others.