One of the great moral errors of our day might be called expropriationism.  If you prefer catchier labels, call it the Robin Hood Fallacy.  According to this notion, government is entitled to confiscate wealth for no other reason than “doing good.”  This leads to a style of politics in which the groups in power decide for us which of their own causes our wealth is to support, taking it by force.  Sometimes they even offer the pretense that they are helping the needy, but usually they confuse the needy with some subset of the merely wanty – or with their partisan clients, which is even worse.

Many Christians seem to miss the point, thinking that expropriation is wrong just because the wrong groups are in power, choosing the wrong causes for subsidy.  This is where the horror stories are offered, and horrible they are:  Of subsidies to promote abortion, subsidies to produce obscene and blasphemous “art,” subsidies for all sorts of wickedness and blasphemy.  But expropriation would be wrong even if each of its causes were good.  Consider the following progression.

1.  On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs.

2.  Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church.

3.  Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who acts as bagman.

4.  Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says.

5.  Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government.

If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft.  Expropriation is wrong not because its causes are wrong, but because it is a violation of the Commandment, Thou shalt not steal -- even if you think you can use the money better than your victim can.

But how, one may ask, can government steal?  We live in a republic; aren't we therefore just taking from ourselves?  No, not even in a republic are the rulers identical with the ruled, nor for that matter are the ruled identical with each other; if we were just taking from ourselves, there would be no need for the taking to be enforced.

Then is all taxation theft?  A lot of people on both left and right think so -- anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-communists, libertarians, voluntarists, and others -- but no.  Government may certainly collect taxes for the support of its proper work.  The key is to identify its proper work.  That work is not the support of all good causes or the doing of all good deeds, because each of the other forms of association in society has its own proper work, which ought not be taken away.  Families have work that no one else can do.  So do churches and synagogues.  So do neighborhoods.  So do protective associations for working people, farmers, and businessmen.  I don’t say that such associations can never desecrate their own work, as when teachers enforce ideological purity instead of teaching, or lobby legislators to increase public education budgets which are already filled with lard.  I only say that they have their own work.

This establishes a strong presumption against most of the things into which government likes to stick its fingers.  Let the other associations confine themselves to doing what only they can do.  Let government confine itself to what only it can do, chiefly by upholding public justice.

But if government were to end its subsidy of good causes, wouldn't these good causes suffer?  Not necessarily; they might even thrive.  As Marvin Olasky has shown in one of my favorite books, The Tragedy of American Compassion, government subsidy itself can make good causes suffer.  One reason is that in taking money by force, one weakens both the means and the motive for people to give freely.  Not only that, but government usually distorts good causes in the act of absorbing them.

But what if the causes did depend on the proceeds of theft?  Should we do evil, that good may come?  There is no such thing as a tame injustice which will do only what we want it to, going quietly back into its bottle when we have finished with it.  Sin is no more like that than holiness is.  In politics, no less than in private life, it ramifies.