Judging from a follow-up discussion, I believe you're using the word "redistribution" in a way that is meaningless and/or needlessly gives ground to a libertarian framing of the situation.
In a nutshell, if you say "redistribution", you must have some baseline in mind. Many people are fooled into accepting an "everyday libertarian" distribution of resources as a baseline, but this is both philosophically problematic and politically foolish if you are not a libertarian yourself.
Taxes are part of the distributive system of society, as are other parts of the legal code such as patents and copyright law. There is no reason to label one part of the law "redistributive" while you call other parts merely "distributive".
Interesting read from Bruenig! While it's true that the term "redistribution" (as opposed to "distribution") implies a default where everyone gets back exactly as much value as they paid into the system, it's also common parlance for progressive taxation and equal benefits. That was the sense in which I used the term.
In a nutshell, if you say "redistribution", you must have some baseline in mind. Many people are fooled into accepting an "everyday libertarian" distribution of resources as a baseline, but this is both philosophically problematic and politically foolish if you are not a libertarian yourself.
Taxes are part of the distributive system of society, as are other parts of the legal code such as patents and copyright law. There is no reason to label one part of the law "redistributive" while you call other parts merely "distributive".
Matt Bruenig makes the argument better than I could, e.g. http://mattbruenig.com/2012/09/20/there-is-no-such-thing-as-... or http://mattbruenig.com/2013/11/14/one-last-note-on-redistrib...