  That purposive takings have no basic moral significance can be shown in another way. Some taxes are lawfully withheld from pay while others are lawfully ‘taken’ after income is in the possession of the taxpayer. In either case, people have enduring legal entitlements to their net rather than their gross incomes. Yet it seems that these contingent facts about different income tax systems could not possibly make any significant difference to our normative assessment of them. Whether a tax can be morally justified depends, therefore, not on whether it involves a redistributive taking, but whether it is compatible with a plausible account of the processes by which people can acquire valid moral claims to things. There are, of course, reasons for considering certain economic systems just, and others unjust, but the fact that these systems involve redistribution in the diachronic sense does not in itself seem to be relevant to these assessments.