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Libertarians love to try to shock with simplistic polemical nostrums: tax=theft; government=violence; welfare=other people's money. Having already demolished the tax=theft nonsense, or at least the arguments that 24601 and the Befuddled One brought forward at the time to support it, let me now put forward a counter-perspective to the "welfare is other people's money" notion, raised in Strawman's post. In Australia, people earn money knowing that it will be subject to taxation and later redistribution. This is part of our social contract and is set down in legislation. Thus, when an individual earns some money, she does not actually "own" it in the sense of it being inalienable other than at her discretion. That is, she does not have full property rights over the money. In fact, it can be argued that some of the money a person earns is in fact other people's money and that the person simply has (temporary) possession of it. From this perspective, when welfare recipients receive payments from the government, they are in fact receiving "their" money as determined by the operation social contract - welfare is, after all, call an "entitlement". Richard
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