  The social practices that are sometimes said to involve rights infringing transfers include compulsory taxation that is used to pay for welfare, social programs provided for the poor and unemployed, and foreign development aid. It is somewhat curious that many critics of conservative and libertarian positions seem to agree that taxation involves redistribution through violation (or at least infringement) of property rights — while maintaining that this is nevertheless justified given the importance of other social  goals.[13]  Indeed, defenses of the welfare state have typically represented taxation for welfare programs as a form of state-administered infringement of property rights — or ‘enforced charity’. These judgments depend, however, on highly specific (and contentious) understandings of economic justice and the processes that give rise to valid entitlements. They seem to suppose, for example, that people have valid moral claims to their gross incomes. A more robust egalitarian critique of these claims would question whether gross income provides the appropriate benchmark for judging whether rights-infringing transfers have occurred. U.S. citizens have a right only to their net incomes, not their gross incomes. They are legally obligated not to evade payment of income tax. The choice of a tax scheme does not reflect a commitment to infringing property rights to serve social goals; indeed, no individual or government agency may interfere with the (legal) use of net income. Rather, the tax scheme reflects a commitment to fixing the content of the rules that determine valid property rights in a particular way. That is, the income tax is part of the process that fixes the initial (normatively relevant) distribution, to which the right-holder is completely  entitled.[14]  The income tax does not represent redistribution, since this takes for granted some different initial distribution of rightful holdings (and thus a right with a different object: in this case, gross  income).[15]  Indeed, consideration of social goals such as general economic security, for instance, often figure in the design of an economic system, including its monetary policies and tax rates, but these same goals seldom figure in justifications of infringements of rights (for example, the repossession of goods that have come to be held by legal means within that system) (Murphy &amp; Nagel 2003, Pogge 1989).  Once we have fixed the content of our economic ground rules (according, of course, to some account of justice), they cannot be viewed as ‘redistributive’ in the rights-infringing sense. Rather, they ought to be viewed as governing how economic benefits and burdens are rightfully distributed in the first place. This is just a specific instance of the general distinction, stressed by Rawls (2001), between the use of forward-looking considerations in justifying a practice (or, in this case, an institutional design) and using those same considerations to justify infringement of the rules of an ongoing practice.