Is Income Redistribution Like Friendship Redistribution?

Will Slate call me America's creepiest blogger?

Imagine a person is very lonely and doesn’t have many friends. They are in the bottom 1% in terms of friends. This makes them very sad. They say things like “I am sad,” and feel things like sadness.

The government, interested in solving this problem, decides to pay people to be their friends. If you hang out at the bar with them for an hour, the government gives you 10 bucks and pays for your drinks. This leads to more people becoming their friend. They stop being sad and begin to utter statements like “I feel happy,” and feel things like happiness.

Is this like income redistribution? In both cases, a person is lacking in some good, so the government spends some funds to make it so they have that good, leading to an increase in their quality of life.

Or, to use a much more incendiary example, one that lead to thousands of people becoming enraged when it was suggested…