Bastiat provides a nice counter point to all that. But I'm too lazy to copy and paste the whole thing here. I'll just suggest reading The Law and/or That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen if you haven't, for another take on things. Note though that there's a lot of subtlety to this whole thing, and Bastiat appears to allow for some notion of lawful taxation, but it's pretty clear that he considers most such transfer of wealth to be what he calls "lawful plunder" and he argues rather eloquently against it.