Many modern governments have sought to "redistribute wealth" in order to attain or approach some kind of "economic equality." As we shall see in a moment, the flawed notion of "economic equality" is subject to widely varying interpretations. In general, however, a government based on this idea takes coercive actions, such as the seizing of wealth from some individuals and subsidization of others, to ensure that each citizen enjoys "equal" (or less "unequal") income.

The term "redistribution of wealth" lends itself easily to misinterpretation and should therefore be avoided. The word "distribution" derives from statistics. A mathematician may speak, for example, of the "distribution of height" within a population, that is, the pattern of relative frequencies of persons within certain ranges of height (often displayed graphically). We should not infer that all of the heights existed in some prior repository, from which they were physically dealt out to the population. Likewise, incomes in a free market arise naturally from human action, as we saw in Section 4. There is no central authority in the free market that "distributes" incomes to various individuals, just as there is no single authority in nature to determine how much height will be allocated to different people. In a market system, wealth is created by individuals pursuing their own ends. Since it does not exist at all prior to that system, it can hardly be "distributed" by it.     

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