Problem is people have differing and conflicting axioms. "Hands off what's not yours" does not converse well with "spread the wealth, by force if necessary".
That's just another way of saying people shouldn't be allowed to give their shares freely. You give your shares to Wilt, the government gives them back to you (assuming the government has no overhead).
So the original argument stands: forced wealth redistribution is incompatible with free will and liberty. The word "force" itself means the removal of freedom.
This is also why wealth redistribution works far less well than people who imagine it as money redistribution think it will. Part of the wealth is tied up in the owner, and that can't be redistributed without loss, sometimes great loss.
Let's take a concrete example. Suppose that class warfare rhetoric utterly wins, and as its first scalp The People decide that the filthy rich Bill Gates needs to have 100% of his wealth confiscated for the good of The People. For simplicity, let's assume that 100% of his wealth is in Microsoft stock. So, The People United take all of his stuff. What do they get? Well, they don't several billion dollars. They get "several billion dollar's worth" of Microsoft stock. Well... that didn't accomplish much. We can't clothe or feed the people Microsoft stock. We need to liquidate it into money to get anywhere, and The People aren't too happy about the filthy capitalist stench of suddenly owning that much stock anyhow, so they immediately sell it all. Of course, dumping all that stock on the market at once immediately sends the price plunging; depending on how foolish The People in terms of wanting to be rid of it immediately it could well plunge to nearly zero. The People destroyed billions of dollars of wealth to obtain probably hundreds of millions of dollars, and quite possibly destroyed Microsoft in the process, hardly a net gain. The stock was as valuable as it was partially because it was in Bill Gates' hands.
In practice, you can't just "claw" wealth from the wealthy and hand it to "the poor" and have the effect you're expecting. You can certainly destroy large amounts of wealth, and yes, the poor will come away with something, but it's far less efficient than the "it's all just money" model leads you to believe. You aren't taking "$100 dollars" away from the wealthy and giving "$100 dollars" to the poor; at scale, you're moving a $100 asset out of the hands of "the wealthy" and into the hands of "the poor", and that's not going to produce the results you were looking for. And again, let me emphasize, it does work to an extent, it just doesn't work as well as you might naively think.
Politics being what they are, people are going to assume that I'm a fan of this truth because I'm saying it. I'm not. It would actually be really cool if redistribution worked as easily as people thought it does! I mean, seriously, awesome. How wonderful it would be if equality could be engineered so trivially! And let me be clear, no sarcasm there. However, it is still true, and it is something we ignore at our own peril. Also, does that mean all our social engineering schemes are hopeless? Well, no, again regardless of whether I'm a fan of them or not, but it does mean that, again, it's harder than we'd like to produce the results we're looking for, and it's a lot easier to overestimate the benefit to the poor and underestimate the damage to the wealthy and the general societal wealth (and even if you don't really care about the wealthy, you ought to care about the general societal wealth) that such schemes can have.
One issue might be that, going by history, there is likely a tipping point where those not in the 1% use force to redistribute. That's got nothing to do with whether the wealth was accrued lawfully.
The worst thing is that it is not the inequality of wealth that matters. It's the inequality of power.
What Piketty and others of this philosophical movement believe is that taking money away from people is the same as removing power.
They are going to be disappointed. Power is a capital item, not a revenue item. Money gets you the contacts with the right people. Lack of money doesn't remove them.
Plus, of course, there isn't a fixed amount of wealth - particularly not financial wealth. So why confiscate when you can accommodate?
It's always the battle of should someone who has access to something valuable but harmful have the ability to use it and have society clean up the consequences.
When phrased this way it sounds pretty darn easy of a choice, but reality never phrases it that way and that person had money to bribe politicians.
And so we struggle. Because those with wealth do not want to give up their wealth.
It feels like a tautology. Of course people with power are going to concentrate it and nudge things to ever greater heights in their favor. To attempt to stop it you need other people with power to do something, at which point they will want to do the same.
The only 'solution' is for everyone to be equally poor, because wealth will never be distributed evenly. Those that generate wealth will not stand to lose it, and they have the options to make sure it doesn't happen.
Why wouldn't people be allowed the freedom to pass on whatever wealth they want? What if they choose to defer gratification and are working to support future generations? Shouldn't that be their individual choice? It seems arbitrary for the government to seize that.
Again I ask, what option? Let's discuss. See, if there was national unity and the rich saw everyone else as their own kind and everyone else saw the rich in the same way things might actually improve.
Of course you have on the extreme mainstream politicians who advocate for simply taking away rich people's money or how billionaires shouldn't exist. As if no one raised them to lnow taking others stuff for no reason is theft and wrong.
The idea that the problem is that some own more than others is itself an idea promoted by those who "own more than others". They set that as the thing to be argued about.
The actual problem is social relations. The heir expropriates the surplus labor time of the worker. That is the real problem.
Wealth redistribution is, in a dialectic sense, a goal of those who own the most wealth. It is a goal set by this elite. Workers controlling our own labor time has been the clear goal of the worker's movement for at least a century and a half, if not longer.
You say "share your wealth".
I say "no".
How do you intend to resolve this? likely by an escalation of force, via fines, incarceration, and (if I say "no" with enough force) siege or execution. That's how government fundamentally works: escalation of compulsion until submission or death.
Once you start redistributing wealth, it turns into a grand 300-million-person argument over who gets what.
Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time.
Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration.
Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that.
Arguments about education and career choices.
There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights.
Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.
Redistributing wealth isn't any more inherently aggressive than any other change. If people object violently to being asked to share the bounties of our industrial economy, that's no different from if they objected violently to being asked to put up with their sister marrying a woman, or to stop smoking in the restaurant.
There is literally nothing stopping the wealthy from giving away their money. It's just that they don't want to give it away, they want to control whatever it is they are "giving" it to. If they could learn to let go, that would be one thing.
Also, the attacks on capitalism are so lame. I've never in my lifetime lived under capitalism, and certainly the crony-capitalism we have or corporo-fascism, or whatever you wish to call this, is not aligned with favoring the individual. It is winner take all pretty much. Under true capitalism, at least bad decisions by CEOs, bankers, and lawyers would eliminate them. Instead, they get huge bailouts and keep right on screwing us over. That's the exercise of power.
Money at that level is power, and giving it up means letting people with similar wealth have more power over you. People don't generally unilaterally disarm.
But why do you feel it is your right or the right of the government to take it from them? Because they happen to be more successful than you? I have never understood the logic of taking from the rich because they are rich. That always sparks the idea of true laziness in the person saying this.
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