Not that we agree with the goal: a high tax and large welfare state society is not something that we desire. Rather, a low tax and richer one where welfare isn't needed to the same extent. But we do find ourselves agreeing with Tony Blair in a manner that we don't with the Corbynites or the Sanderistas. If a higher, or large, welfare state is what you desire it is that third way that can deliver it. Other options, from predistribution through to market rigging just don't work. Another way of putting this is that if National Review have got it then Scott Sumner's message is being heard:
Socialism has two relevant features: Central planning of the economy by political powers and the public provision of ordinary goods (as opposed to public goods such as national defense and judicial systems). This is distinct from welfare-state policies such as those found in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Sweden has a large and expensive welfare state, but it has a robustly capitalistic trade-driven economy that in many ways is more free-market than our own, with lower corporate taxes and fewer trade barriers. The difference between welfare programs and socialism is the difference between food stamps and the state-run groceries that were the bane of the common people’s existence in the old Soviet Union and in modern Venezuela. The former is imperfect, the latter catastrophic.
We would, of course, prefer perfection, as far as that is possible in any human endeavour. A low tax, low welfare society in which the general level of wealth makes public provision for any other than the truly incapable unnecessary. But our message to those who disagree with that idea is that Tony Blair really was still right about that third way. If you do want to do it then you really do have to do what the Nordics have done. Let markets rip (entirely different from allowing capitalism to run amok) and then tax it to produce the transfers.
Another way of putting this is that those who insist that others should have more of what they have should be put to the test. Are you willing to give up what you have that others may have it? If not then perhaps you don't quite believe your rhetoric then, eh?
And a third way of putting this is that redistribution has to be redistribution: the taking from some to the giving to others. And our intuition on this is that those being redistributed from tend to object when it's put in such stark terms. When members of the 1% change their minds on this perhaps we will too.
Or, you know, maybe we won't.