if someone with a fridge full of food can toss a sack of rice to someone who's starving (or, better yet, seeds/technique/etc to set them up), OF COURSE they should do it. i certainly would. should someone - whether an individual or a state - be able to use physical force to force someone's hand in this manner? no. this distinction is a very important one to me (and is also a point many misinterpret objectivist positions on; see earlier comments in the thread wherein people imply rand would not give water to a child dying of thirst. she would- the point is that the state has no right to establish itself as an intermediary in areas such as altruism)
and i want to make clear that this is an extreme scenario- the VAST majority of gov redistribution/altruism is not the gov acting as an efficient intermediary between 1st-world nations and impoverished sudanese. the manner the gov most commonly acts in these regards is to take a dollar, burn 80%+ on bureaucracy/itself, and allocate the remaining 20% in a manner far, far less respectable than rice to starving children.
you'll never catch me advocating for gov-sponsored redistribution, but you won't hear me complain about an efficient and clearly life-saving gov program of getting food/meds to people who're truly unable to survive w/o such intervention. sadly, that's such an infinitely small % of how the gov operates that it's practically irrelevant. if all the gov's programs of this nature did was things such as this, i wouldn't take issue; that is not reality tho.
That is simply the nature of taxes and government. Most of us would rather face taxes than a world without any form of government, threat of force involved in taxation be damned. Without redistribution of some kind or another, people within any nation would be subject to the aforementioned extreme suffering.
If faced with the decision between dropping the entire social safety net within our society in order to respect the individual financial freedoms of property owning individuals, and if this decision would lead to people starving to death, losing access to clean water, and therefore contributing to the outbreak of the diseases of poverty (dysentery, malaria, tapeworm, etc..), would you do it?
Or would you choose, with the knowledge that nobody within an individual nation would starve, not have access to clean water, and therefore prevent the diseases of poverty, to increase taxation, particularly of the wealthy, for the greater good? What if we can definitively say that a tax rate of 50% on all individuals living in affluent nations could definitively end global poverty? What if 50% simply prevented poverty within our own nation?
We all know that there are individuals right now who can significantly reduce, if not eliminate, global poverty with the resources they have at their disposal (see the Oxfam thread in CE&P). And yet, all this individual wealth, the highest wealth disparity we have ever had since at least the Industrial Revolution, and things are as bad or even worse than they have been before. These individuals obviously do not choose to spend their resources on global poverty with enough force to make a significant impact on it. It leaves us with a decision, and that decision is: Whose suffering do we respect more? The suffering of the Fortune 500 company owner who is forced to pay higher taxes, or the suffering of the 100,000 people the taxes on him and him alone can save?
Even if we assume that you are correct, and only 20% of our intended aide actually gets where it is supposed to get, is a 20% decrease in worldwide global poverty simply not worth it? From the 1,000,000,000 children in poverty figure posted above, we are still taking about the lives of 200,000,000 children.
