If I earn a million dollars from my business, that's my money. I earned it.

If I give it to my kids, or for that matter, to charity, or the first guy I meet on the street, or my dog, it's THEIR money. I gave it to them.

If they give it to somebody else, then the money belongs to whoever they give it to.

It's that simple, and any third grader would know this was true.

Property rights, and the choices of the property owners, are paramount.

While I can understand the looters trying their damndest to get their fingers into the wealth somewhere along the line, let's not pretend that they have any more right to take the money at the third level than they do at the first.

And let's not pretend that the money, distributed among fifty looters, would do society any more good than if it was left where it was in the hands of one millionaire. Politicians, of course, who gain and keep power by doing the distributing, would disagree.

The function of most of taxation is for politicians to take wealth from the hands of a few and pass it to as many voters as possible. You can take a million dollars from a man with one vote and give 1,000 voters $1000 each. You do the political math. Then you take a survey, and find out, well, whaddaya know, that only 1 out of 1,000 people think they need their taxes cut! Getting the picture?

It's not paying for highways, or defense, or schools, or NASA, or any of that other stuff. All of that adds up to less than half the budget. The rest is simple wealth redistribution. And that percentage isn't getting any lower.