Redistribution of income and wealth is the transfer of income and wealth (including physical property) from some individuals to others through a social mechanism such as taxation, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confiscation, divorce or tort law. The term typically refers to redistribution on an economy-wide basis rather than between selected individuals. Understanding of the phrase varies, depending on personal perspectives, political ideologies and the selective use of statistics. It is frequently used in politics, to refer to perceived redistribution from those who have more to those who have less. Rarely, the term is used to describe laws or policies that cause redistribution in the opposite direction, from the poor to the rich. The phrase is sometimes related to the term class warfare, where the redistribution is alleged to counteract harm caused by high-income earners and the wealthy through means such as unfairness and discrimination. Redistribution tax policy should not be confused with predistribution policies. "Predistribution" is the idea that the state should try to prevent inequalities from occurring in the first place rather than through the tax and benefits system once they have occurred. For example, a government predistribution policy might require employers to pay all employees a living wage and not just a minimum wage, as a "bottom-up" response to widespread income inequalities or high poverty rates. Many "top-down" taxation proposals have been floated. In the United States, the "Buffett Rule" is a hybrid taxation model composed of opposing systems intended to minimize the favoritism of special interests in tax design. The effects of a redistributive system are actively debated on ethical and economic grounds. The subject includes an analysis of its rationales, objectives, means, and policy effectiveness.
History In antiquity, redistribution operated within a palace economy, whereby the government, meaning the dictator or pharaoh, had both the ability and the right to say who was taxed and who received special treatment. In the West, ancient civilisations had customs to aid wealth redistribution, such as the ancient Jews, whose Jubilee relieved the debts of the poor, and the ancient Greeks, whose liturgies saw the rich voluntarily financed the city-states. In the early modern period, there have been experiments in agrarian socialism. For example, in the Plymouth Colony under the leadership of William Bradford, who recorded in his diary that this "common course" bred confusion, discontent, and distrust among colonists, who looked upon the system as a form of slavery. A closely related term, distributism (also known as distributionism or distributivism), refers to an economic ideology that developed in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was based on the principles of Catholic social teaching, particularly the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno. More recently, Pope Francis echoed the earlier Papal statements in his Evangelii Gaudium. In 1789, Montesquieu posited in The Spirit of Law that progressive tax is most suited to liberty, whereas a regressive tax is most suited to slavery. In contemporary society, this principle is still prevalent, where progressive taxation is recognized as a means to redistribute income and wealth from the rich to the poor.
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