The authors of the study may want to grant people who make poor choices an enforceable claim to the incomes of people who make better choices, but there are no moral grounds to do so. Of course, anyone is free to redistribute his own income, but no one has a moral right to redistribute incomes created by other people without their consent. He meant that all people have the same natural rights and that a just government is one that enforces them equally for all people. It is also self-evident that all people are not created equal in terms of mental and physical abilities, alertness, attitudes, and other human attributes. In a market economy those natural differences inevitably result in different people creating different amounts of income and wealth.
Governments impose income distributions by taking from some people and giving to others.
The victims of the takings are treated one way by government, and the recipients of the takings are treated another way. If a government wants to impose a more equal income distribution to mitigate the effects of natural human inequalities, it must discard Jefferson's principle that a just government must treat all people equally under the law. We have already gone far down that road, and it has already pulled us apart. The authors would have us go further. Like socialists around the world, they think there is never enough coercive redistribution.