To rob Peter to pay Paul

[1] It may have originated in Middle English as a collocation of common names – similar to, for example, Tom, Dick, and Harry – with the religious connotations accruing later,[9] or alternatively as a reference to Saint Peter and Saint Paul (who are often depicted jointly in Christian art and regarded similarly in theology).

All of that, combined with the medieval English people being almost universally Christian, made it quite common to hear these names together.

[10][11] Despite these origins, English folklore has it that the phrase alludes to an event in 1550 England in which the abbey church of Saint Peter, Westminster was deemed a cathedral by letters patent; but ten years later it was absorbed into the diocese of London when the diocese of Westminster was dissolved, and a few years after that many of its assets were expropriated for repairs to Saint Paul's Cathedral.

[1][12] "Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul" is Rudyard Kipling's adaptation of the phrase, used to criticize the concepts of income redistribution and collectivism.

[13] Kipling included the expression in his poem "Gods of the Copybook Headings", and argued that it should be featured in "catechisms" of the Conservative Central Organization; the lesson of the phrase in his version, and of the poem in general, was that "only out of the savings of the thrifty can be made the wage-fund to set other men on the way to be prosperous.