Expanding slightly on your indisputable logic it is also a fact that if all the money in the world was lodged in an enormous common fund and divided equally among everyone it wouldn't be long before the rich had their wealth back and life's losers would be whinging about being poor.

It's completely illogical to demand a hard worker hand over his money to a couch dweller. It's a form of tyranny, and essentially slavery. I work, you get paid? There's a laugh.

I've got two main reasons why I believe you're wrong and redistribution of wealth is somewhat necessary. One is inequality of work. The other is the issue of employment opportunities and the inevitable increasing lack thereof.

It should be obvious that not all hours worked receive the same merit, or payment. In theory, those that work jobs that require a large amounts of time to acquire the necessary skills and jobs that are in demand receive more pay. The biggest violations of this happen to but are not limited to be caused by some of the richest people that own companies. When you run a company, there's no obligation to keep things cheap, you are tempted to take as much profit as you can rather than what you may or may not have earned. For example, Bill Gates. A rudimentary google search brought his earnings in one year to be 11.5 billion dollars. Comparing that to a well paid doctor, the job and role in society Bill Gates performs is worth that of 200,000 doctors. This is ridiculous and completely disproportionate to the actual work Mr Gates puts into his work. Even if we take the best case where Gates is an angelical workaholic that does nothing wrong and works every hour of the day, this is not equivalent to 200,000 doctors. This is a very rudimentary comparison, with subjective parameters, but it illustrates the issue.

A similar example would be stocks and shares, where in theory the investment you make is worthy of reward in itself, which is already debatable, but many will invest in a company and make upwards of ten-fold their original investment upon selling. This can inflate your 1000 - 2000 dollar earnings for the month into amounts you'd never be able to reach by working, merely by betting on 20-90% odds of success. Bitcoin is similar in this way too.

The point is that work is meant to be rewarded with money, but often money is awarded for no or proportionally little effort or risk. Honestly this shouldn't be permitted to happen in the first place, but a viable second measure is correction; which is what wealth distribution resorts to.

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A separate issue particularly relevant to the time we live in is rising unemployment. As a species we have needs which draw on resources and require a certain amount of work to be done, just to survive, as a result of the universe we live in. Clearly, to this day we've been doing this, though it used to be that most people worked on agriculture, supporting basic human needs. Due to innovation in various farming methods vastly less work is required to produce the same output. We're now at the point where virtually all this work we used to do is done by machines, and are at the brink of cutting out the middle men for our needs altogether and replacing them with robots. The people that would have been farming aren't lazy, their jobs are being done for them, made redundant by either improved efficiency or outright mechanical replacement. This has been or inevitably will be analogous to all employment opportunities as cheaper methods are developed.

Most importantly, the work we need to be done is still being done. The human work-hour cost of a human life due to basic needs has been reduced to very little. At this point we don't need people to be employed all their lives simply to exist. This will continue as we profit off the work of machines, creating value from nothing at unprecedented rates, to the point where the base cost of a life becomes meaningless. This isn't something that has been addressed whatsoever, and we've taken it to the point where we invent busywork for ourselves for the sake of earning money to survive against costs that have long since become insignificant. Creating and consuming entertainment. Endless work put into designing variations of products from scratch which result with minor changes. Perhaps you want your phone to have another hour of battery life and your screen to have twice the resolution, but this costs hundreds of thousands of work-hours for such a menial improvement, which if were attempted later when appropriate technologies are developed would achieve much more. We fight against (or for, depending how you want to see it) each other instead of against thermodynamics. I won't say I dislike where we are now, I consume just like everyone else. However these minor quality of life benefits of our society should not and need not come at the cost of someone's basic survival. It should not be a requirement for someone to work when their actual cost of living on our resources is so low. This is especially important where it's no longer possible for people to contribute to whatever meaningful or meaningless jobs out there as we replace people with machines.

EXACTLY! That's why a Congress and Senate that constantly passes laws and regulations that "redistribute" the wealth UPWARD is retarded! We have been living in a period of redistributed wealth since Reagan! Trumps "tax plan for the middle class" is in actuality a "redistribution" of MORE wealth to the rich (including HIMSELF)! His EPA Chief is "redistributing" even MORE wealth to the coal miners, gold miners oil drillers and hundreds of other BIG MONEY groups which "create" very few jobs for the damage they do! Yep! It's definitely retarded! (Gas and lumber prices, for example, are eating … to many HAVE eaten … all your "tax savings" already! Not so the ones on the "redistributed end"!!!

The most basic problem with the proposition that poverty is the result of some people having too much money is that it is founded on two mistaken beliefs.

- Misunderstanding 1 - The rich are rich because they have more money.

Not really the case.

In reality, the rich are rich because they own non-cash assets like businesses, stocks (partial value of businesses), and bonds (loans they are waiting for someone to pay back).

What they own is actually what other people depend on to be able to work and earn a living.

- Misunderstanding 2 - There is a limited amount of wealth that requires some people to give up their wealth so that others can stop being poor.

Completely untrue.

The businesses that compose most of the value of rich people's assets have value because they are actually mechanisms for making or doing valuable things. These businesses are how their employees create wealth that is distributed through commerce and paychecks to the companies' customers, employees, and investors.

Capitalism and capitalist enterprises are the greatest mechanisms ever devised for reducing and eliminating poverty. The last four centuries of capitalism have been so successful at creating wealth for everybody in the world that people have had to redefine poverty in order for there still to be poor people in most countries. Obesity has actually overtaken starvation as the primary health risk in the world.

If you take these assets away from the people who own and run them, and then split them up and give the value to people at the bottom of the economic spectrum, you will be breaking the only successful mechanism for helping those people on the bottom.

- Misunderstanding 3 - Economic disparities are based on a dominance hierarchy.

Close, but no cigar.

The hierarchy is not based on dominance, but competence.

If you take the assets away from successful people, and give them to unsuccessful people is put the companies' employees livelihoods in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they are not good at creating wealth. That is the perfect recipe for making everybody equally poor.