Answering the Rhetorical Question of Homer, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept That I'm Surrounded By Idiots, A Blog Post With A Title Not Much Longer Than The Actual Post: So here's Sandefur's question:

So, once again, I ask, if Erik Peterson agrees that redistribution of wealth is theft, how can he believe that the state has the right to commit theft? Where does the state get this right?

The answer is to be found in the answering of Homer's rhetorical question, which Sandefur quoted somewhere over the course of this discussion:

Who's to say what's right and wrong nowadays, what with our modern ways....

His answer would likely be the judiciary. My--qualified--answer would be the majority. Or the duly elected representatives of the majority.

So why not take it a step further? Why not allow morality to be determined by the appointees of the duly elected representatives of the majority, and say it's good enough?

Because it unfairly tips the scales of our checks and balances in favor of the judiciary.

It is one thing for the judiciary to decide on how to interpret the finer points of the law, overturn legislative pronouncements that exceed the boundaries set by governing legislative pronouncements.

It's another thing altogether for justices and judges to spin law in whole cloth based on their individual perceptions.

So what about the public choice effect? What about the idea that, if given free reign to do what they will, the voters will shackle up Steven King and force him to release the rest of the Dark Tower series immediately, for fifty cents a copy? That the majority would force those who base their judgments of Kirsten Dunst's beauty on bad paparazzi photos to be subjected to electroshock-based re-education?

This is where the wonderful rotating and sliding scales of checks and balances come into play. When the electorate begins to abuse its power, it does become necessary for the courts to step in and take some of that power away. This is why I qualified my answer above--because in a balanced system, even the electorate should not become too powerful, and should fail to get its way from time to time. The same should happen when the judiciary starts running wild--the people's voice should be able to step in and overrule it.

And the later will, inevitably, be the case more often than the reverse.

In a government of the people, by the people, for the people, the people should, and do, have the greatest influence on the nation's policy. In fact, if you tried to draw the line anywhere else, it would still find it's way back to the side of the people, because that's how things work in a democracy.

. . . we get the presidents we deserve. A great people is what you need for a great president. Washington was the greatest president, because the people were at their most enlightened and alert. [America] right now is escapist. It wants to be soothed, and told it doesn't have to pay or sacrifice or learn. [Willis, Garry, "Things That Matter," Vis a Vis, July 1988, p. 70]

It has to be that way. I do not believe that a government of elected officials and their appointees can keep the nation moral if the people of the nation are morally bankrupt any more than I believe the government could somehow feed every hungry mouth if the people of the nation stopped being industrious.

You cannot impose morality on a free people and still claim they are free to govern themselves. Such is the paradox of a free society. It only lasts so long as the people in it continue to have the values that uphold it.

Jeffrey R. Holland said, in the same commencement speech from which I took the above quote,

Such public and personal virtue was understood by the Founding Fathers to be the precondition for republican government, the base upon which the structure of all government would be built. Such personal ideals as John Adams' "virtuous citizen" and Thomas Jefferson's "moral sense" and "aristocracy of talent and virtue" were fundamental. Even the pessimistic James Madison said,

I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. [20 June 1788, in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, arr. Jonathan Elliot, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1901), pp. 536­37]

So while I may be fully confident that I have the moral high ground, this does me no good until I am able to persuade my neighbor of the same, and we convince our other neighbors, and together, cumulatively, we arrive at a better place. To paraphrase former LDS church president and US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, it is one thing to try and take the people out of the slums, but quite another to take slums out of the hearts of the people, so they can take themselves out of the slums.

So, for me, all of this means that the people of the nation are free--within limits--to decide what actions are "moral." If I feel differently, it is my responsibility to help them see why they are wrong.