Yes, the welfare state robs the former to pay the latter.
Within another segment of National Review‘s special constitutional issue, Matthew J. Franck explains how the convoluted system obfuscates its thievery:
[W]hat is the transfer-payment bureaucracy of the welfare state if not a great Rube Goldberg machine for the accomplishment of such expropriations from A for B’s benefit, multiplied by many millions on a daily basis? What makes the welfare state such a large-scale engine of expropriation and transfer is that it does not rely on the traditional mode of the decree, moving property from some named individuals to others, or even from one named class to another. Instead it obeys the forms of law, relying on the power to tax from one and appropriate to the other. This enables a vast increase in the numbers of people deprived of their wealth, and of those provided with the wealth so obtained, now called welfare benefits. Yet while the arrangement has the outward form of law, the fact that tax dollars are spent directly on persons (again, with no consideration of value in return, or of past service now rewarded) rather than things, means that the substance of lawfulness is hollowed out by the welfare state. In effect, the state becomes a money launderer. What due process would not permit it to do on a case-by-case basis ? decreeing that A’s money shall be directly shifted to B’s pocket ? it does instead by gathering tax dollars into the treasury from A and then disbursing them to B, often in the undisguised indecency of a single statute accomplishing both steps, as in Social Security.
