Came across an article by N. Gregory Mankiw that highlights the classical fallacy in libertarian reasoning. The article was published in the New York Times in July of 2007 and titled ‘Fair Taxes? Depends What You Mean by ‘Fair’.” Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and was an advisor to Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Mankiw says:

“None of these calculations, however, say whether the rich are paying their fair share. Fairness is not an economic concept. If you want to talk fairness, you have to leave the department of economics and head over to philosophy.
“The quintessential political philosopher of modern liberalism is John Rawls, the author of the 1971 classic “A Theory of Justice.” Professor Rawls concluded that the primary goal of public policy should be to redistribute resources to help those at the very bottom of the economic ladder. If Professor Rawls were alive today, he would most likely want to raise the top income tax rate of 35 percent in order to finance a more generous safety net. And for much the same reason, he would probably raise taxes on the middle class as well.
“Professor Rawls would get a vigorous debate from his Harvard colleague, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. In his 1974 book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Professor Nozick wrote: “We are not in the position of children who have been given portions of pie by someone who now makes last-minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons.”
“To libertarians like Professor Nozick, requiring the rich to pay more just because they are rich is little more than officially sanctioned theft.
“There is no easy way to bridge this philosophical divide, but the political process will, inevitably, try to forge a practical compromise among those with wildly divergent views.”

Of course there is an easy way to bridge this philosophical divide. Professor Nozick has the moral perspicacity of a hyena. His theory that the rich should be permitted to trample the poor just because they can is morally and ethically reprehensible to the core and all thinking caring Americans should reject it out of hand. I say noblesse oblige.
Nozick makes the classic libertarian error of treating the “state” as if it were an entity separate from the people and then structuring his discourse around an adversarial conception of the relationship between the people and the state. This is only the case if the “state” is a king or dictator. In a democracy, the government is us. The decision to take money from the rich and give it to the poor, in fact, arises “out of the voluntary exchanges and actions” of the people, acting through the government to carry out their will. Thank God the people have a better developed moral sense than Professor Nozick and his libertarian buddies. When individuals (or any segment of society) forget their moral obligations, it is in our best interest to remind them or if necessary compel them to act. This is critical for our protection and for the benefit and stability of society.