  Sometimes redistribution is taken to refer to a particular social mechanism for bringing about changes in holdings overtime — namely, when there has been some prior distribution of resources, and those particular resources have been ‘taken’ away from some of those who initially possessed them and given to others. Let us refer to this second diachronic understanding as ‘redistribution as taking’. Identifying instances of redistribution as purposive taking requires specifying (1) a set of holdings of some rigidly identifiable agents (a, b, c) that obtains at time t1; (2) the set of the holdings of these agents that obtains after the policy or institutional changes have been enacted at time t2; and (3) the agent(s) that have ‘taken’ the holdings of some of these agents and distributed them to other of these agents.