To answer your question as simply as I can, it’s not so much that people believe that they have “a right to your property” (other than thieves, that is, who steal it outright without thought or regard for “rights”). The taking and redistributing is done indirectly by government. That’s what it’s for, after all.
As government is established and grows there needs to be a submission of the citizens to the needs and wants of the government, or it simply won’t survive. Therefore, government protects itself very well to ensure that it will survive, and we submit.
We form governments, as the Preamble to the Constitution says, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. I suppose that other countries justify their governments in more or less the same way, even if not so explicitly, and even if they never mention “liberty”. (Which is really not quite apt in any case, since once you have formed a government you are no longer liberated from it.)
Reasonable people will differ about the limits and meanings of each of those terms, so we hold elections to determine who will best represent what we want them to mean. Reasonable people also agree with most of the claims above: we don’t want people dying in the streets, starving and looting, suffering all manner of preventable (or curable) illness and in misery of any kind, if we can help it.
And there’s the rub. When you form a government among 300,000,000 people from the richest nation the world has ever seen, you can form a collective that has the power to do a lot of good. It also has the power to do a lot of bad, too, but I’m trying to avoid that for now.
So the representatives of that government attempt to do all of the “good” that they can, using other people’s money. (This is another place where reasonable people differ about what “good” is better than other “good”, or if “good” as defined by some is “bad” as defined by others, and which of those groups has more elective power.)
We often hear claims from elected representatives and others who work for and with them that various regulations and services that they’ve decided to implement and pay for – generally at huge cost when it’s a service that applies to the whole aforementioned nation – that “if it saves only one life then it will have been ‘worth it’”.
Well, that ain’t necessarily so.
To name one example (without naming names), if a person has a debilitating illness that can be treated successfully (or even just palliatively, to remove the pain) for a certain dollar amount, and if the government has that money, then why not apply that cure or remedy for that person? Who wouldn’t do that if he could? Certainly a parent would, and many do, and go bankrupt because of it. But we don’t bankrupt ourselves for “other people’s problems”. If you’re spending other people’s money, though, and your job depends to some extent on spending that money, then you’re incentivized beyond simple humanity to spend that money: It can get you re-elected!
But what if the cure costs 100 times the amount we thought it would? What if it costs 10,000 times as much? Is it really “worth it” to attempt to heal and cure every ill without regard to cost?
Some reasonable people think… no, it’s not. It’s too bad that we can’t have everything (or cure every ill), but we simply can’t. It’s not that “we should do nothing collectively” – not many reasonable people believe that. It’s just that we can’t do “everything”. Dickens has nothing to do with it.
That was the simple answer.
