> how can we morally justify taking money from others at gunpoint to make things "fairer"? How do we justify it for paying for our common defense (the military

> how can we morally justify taking money from others at gunpoint to make things "fairer"? How do we justify it for paying for our common defense (the military), theoretically blind justice (the court system), public roads and infrastructure, critical public health programs? The answer is that if we don't, there would be dire consequences. It's not so different for the consequences of high inequality, or as someone recently put it cheekily: the Hamptons are not defensible ground. However, you appear to be conflating taxation as a method of raising government revenue with the question of whether a society should have have resource redistribution of any kind. Can you propose an alternate mechanism for raising government revenue, other than by threat of seizing it? Or perhaps you simply oppose governments raising revenue at all, and by consequence, the existence of government itself? We have many contemporary examples of societies that lack the ability to centrally tax and raise revenue. What happens in these places is revenue still gets raised, but in a decentralized way, and usually with the threat of real violence.