Nir wrote:

Thank you for this! I had indeed heard about the article secondhand.
Within your remarks it says:

“Because another person’s duties do not justify my taking them for myself. A poor person cannot take money from me just because I am obligated to give him charity. The duty to give charity does not stem from the poor person’s right, but from my duty.”
Could you expand on that? If I have a duty to bring something to someone, where does that duty come from? If the object legally belongs to him, then he has a right to it, doesn’t he? And if moral justice requires it, then that too. In truth, the object ought to belong to the poor person; why doesn’t he have a right to it? In other words: where does a duty without a right come from?
And in general, I think the Talmud says that if a priest damaged terumah, then the priests have no ability to claim against him, because there are many priests, and not because they have no right in the matter. Is it different with a poor person? Could I please have a source for that distinction?

There are instructions above here about how to do this on a smartphone. If it still doesn’t work, please send it to me by email with a link to the original thread and I’ll enter it. Please don’t open another thread, because that confuses me and everyone else.

As for your actual questions:
The duty comes from the Holy One, blessed be He. Exactly like a legal duty (for example, to pay taxes or serve in the army) which comes from the legislator. I did not understand why an explanation of a duty based on a right seems clearer to you. There too you could ask where the right came from.

In the case of priests, we are dealing with terumah that has already been separated, and then in simple terms it belongs to the tribe of priests, even if not to an individual priest. So there there is a right, but it does not belong to one individual person. (If they all granted each other authorization, perhaps they could sue jointly.) When the damager is himself a priest, the possibility of claiming from him is reduced further, because he himself would not join the authorization.

I didn’t understand why you want a source, or what source. Would it enter your mind that if I damage my own property I would become obligated to pay compensation to a poor person? Why would that be so? Terumah is defined as terumah after separation. Perhaps there is room to discuss the law of charity money that has already been set aside but not yet given.
The basic claim that charity is not the poor people’s property and that they have no right to it is simple and needs no source. That is why it appears in the Yoreh De’ah section of the Shulchan Arukh.

By logical reasoning, one could distinguish between charity up to a third of a shekel per year, which I am obligated to give, and regarding that there is room to compare it to terumah, so that it would be the property of the “tribe of the poor” (after separation), and between charity beyond that, where only if a specific poor person stands before me do I have an obligation to give him, in which case it is not the property of the “tribe” at all (and of course not his either).