I don’t think that taxes should be used to necessarily ‘redistribute wealth’ so much as to even out the injustices and inequalities in society.

The Labour party in the UK want to increase taxes and use this increased revenue to increase public spending and the provisions of the state which ultimately help the least fortunate in society and in turn, redistribute wealth.

Ways that labour proposed to even out the societal playing field would all be done via increased taxation and also spending cuts in other sectors like military.

Promises labour made in their 2019 manifesto that I think corroborate the idea that taxes should be used to redistribute wealth were:

• bring the energy bills of nearly 10 million low-income households down by an average of £417 a year and eradicate fuel poverty, benefiting 1.14 million elderly people.
• Overall spending for the NHS increased, paid for by rises in income tax on the highest 5% of earners, plus increasing tax on private medical insurance.
• abolish the benefits freeze, scrap universal credit and put an end to the two-child benefits limit
• bring into public ownership the gas and electricity supply networks and the privatised water and sewerage companies. It has also proposed renationalising the rail operating companies and the Royal Mail.

This is for the benefit of the entirety of society as when everyone is helped to achieve their full potential, society thrives. Therefore, yes, taxes should be used to redistribute wealth but in an indirect and assistive way.

I advocate that we should redistribute both income and assets in order to eradicate injustice and inequalities.

• Redistributing income could come in the form of practices such as increased income taxes for the upper classes and use this extra wealth to form social safety nets for the lower classes.
• Redistributing assets could include wealth tax, confiscation, and land reform.
• The government tax and can refuse council housing to the poorest of society for having so much as an extra bedroom - we can instead implement these policies for those with excessive estate and provide more homes for those in need while hundreds of thousands of homes lie empty.
• Profit is the unpaid wages of the working class.
• Those hoarding wealth, particularly those more wealth than they need/could ever spend in a lifetime, would not find themselves in any hardship from redistribution, but it would be positively life-changing for millions.
• The vast majority who oppose these policies are under the false impression that they would personally lose money, however, the opposite is in fact true.
• Such policies would only need to apply to somewhere around the richest 1%, who own more than half of the world's wealth, in order for enough wealth to be reclaimed and shared to the other 99% of people.