If you have the time, take up a copy of Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" and skip straight ahead to part II, Beyond the Minimal State. A political thinker and popular philosopher, Nozick's theory of ownership remains one of the strongest critiques of redistributive justice in popular circulation.

As a blurb, Nozick's theory of ownership operates in opposition to the Rawlsian ideas of just redistribution. According to Nozick, theories of redistribution inherently ignore the historical sources of inequality as they focus upon justifiable patterns of distribution rather than historical entitlement.

For instance, Hayek's views of distribution according to value contributed looks only at a snapshot in time and redistributes wealth according to a pattern of "the one who contributes most gets more wealth" (paraphrasing and oversimplifying, but you get the point about patterns). The same problem would apply even for a socialist perspective as suggested by Rawls, which redistributes income such that the worst-off member of a society is doing as well as he could.

In a statement against redistributive justice, Nozick argues that distribution should be seen as a process rather than an end-goal. Distribution of wealth constantly occurs and re-occurs as people engage in trade, employment, and other such gainful acts. As such, rather than focusing on a just amount of wealth each man may have in a frozen moment in time, Nozick argues that just redistribution requires a just process by which the dynamic process of redistribution may occur.

To simplify, it is no issue that a man has great wealth provided that the means by which he obtained that wealth is done via a just process of distribution, and Nozick's view is that the most just process is one which respects individual property rights first and foremost.