If you redistribute the wealth of the industrious to those who only wish to schlep around, you grow the schlepping around economic sector, with its corresponding reverberations on the GDP. I highly recommend an article published by the Cato Institute in 2007, entitled, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.” It is cleverly-written in non-technical language; and it might give you ammo for some of those uninformed arguments that keep resurfacing. Here’s the link:

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/13673547