Brian Peacock wrote:
I made it clear that I was not drawing direct equivalence between inherited riches and the hereditary succession of monarchs, so your deflecting strawman is as uncharitable as it is misplaced.
Direct or indirect I chose to address the distinction because it is important to dismiss the very notion that inheritance is in any way equivalent to hereditary succession.
What little I actually have put forward has not been done so on the basis of some peculiar and particular notion of 'Marxist fairness' but on the basis of a mass of accumulated evidence which demonstrates that reducing income inequality ultimately benefits all in society, not just the poor.
Yes, that is a laudable and useful thing to do. Income inequality is not a good thing, but the devil is as usual in the details. It's one thing to say that an underprivileged class of persons who have been the victims of deliberate economic discrimination intended to keep them poor is deserving of both assistance and laws that protect them from that discrimination and help them to lift themselves out of poverty. It's something entirely different to say that because there are underprivileged persons in the world that it is therefor immoral to be wealthy and that expropriating that wealth to gift it to the underprivileged is the way to compensate them for that "unfairness" they have suffered.
If there are underprivileged and oppressed groups in a society that need to be supported and lifted from poverty then it is the moral duty of
everyone in society to assist in that effort. Targeting the wealthy just because they are wealthy is as immoral and unfair as discriminating against some social group to their economic disadvantage. The wealthy are no more responsible for income inequality than anyone else is, but the Marxist dialectic demands that the wealthy be targeted as immoral leeches for no better reason than that they have more than others, which is of course fallacious reasoning based in an ideological belief that Marx stated that holds that the bourgeoisie merchant class and the aristocracy cannot have gotten wealthy without taking wealth from the proletarian class. This ideological fallacy is set forth in Marx's Das Kapital, where the fundamental argument upon which his entire philosophy is built consists of the single proposition that "rent seeking" and capital investment are not legitimate forms of "labor" and that therefore the gains enjoyed by the landlords, merchants and investors are ill-gotten and the product of the theft of labor from the worker.
This is, of course, ideological nonsense because economies are not closed systems where one person's gain in wealth is offset by another person's loss of wealth. It is the classic Marxist zero-sum game fallacy upon which the entire edifice of Marxism, as well as socialism, is founded, and it's a foundation of sand that crumbles at the first sign of rational examination.
OK, so structural measure to facilitate this will mean a few could end up with a slightly smaller portion of the pie than they might have otherwise, but they'll still have more pie than they can eat. I'd be grateful if you could at least try to pay attention to what I post and put your misplaced assumptions about my motivation and political inclinations aside for the moment, if you can.
So what your moral argument for redistributionism boils down to is "the bourgeoisie merchant class has more wealth than the proletarian labor class, which is more wealth that it "needs," and so it can afford to be stripped of its wealth to benefit the proletarians. Therefore it is morally just to seize and redistribute the fruits of the wealthy to the poor for no better reason than it's there to be stripped away and the poor want it."
Whatever you have to say about income inequality it seems to me that a better moral and rational justification than "they've got it, we want it" is required for stealing the fruits of one man's labor to benefit another" because on that basis there is nothing that protects anyone from having their labor stolen and redistributed to others, no matter what their beginning economic condition because there will always be someone wealthier than someone else.
If societal economic inequality is the product of deliberate intent or deliberate discrimination then it is the burden of the entire society to repudiate that bias and contribute to righting the wrong committed against the oppressed class, and morally there is nothing that suggests that the amount of wealth that one person has should determine what percentage of his wealth he must sacrifice to the resolution of that systemic income inequality.
It is better to dun 100 million people one dollar each than it is to dun Bill Gates 100 million dollars because Bill Gates is not 100 million times more responsible for the plight of the poor than anybody else is. Everybody is equally to blame for such societal failures.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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I was pointing out that feminism along with SJWism and the left in general go down the root of purity tests then there can be only one winner in the oppressed olympics. 
Also I'm attacking a group/s here not individuals so your example still fails. 
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