“That’s the whole point. It’s not a matter of asking the ‘people who work hard’ and because of that earn a high income, to be charitable and compassionate, and give something back to people who do nothing (because they are lazy, sick, disabled, etc. ). Let them keep it.
We’re talking about leveling the income of a different, much bigger group. From the point of view of work, that is work-that-earns-you-a-wage, these people do literally nothing. They include the disabled, the homeless, the unemployed, but also the very rich. Everyone puts in the same amount of work: nothing. The problem is that in our present system, some people actually earn a lot more money for doing nothing than others. In other words, they get a much bigger share of what doing nothing yields.
Consider this. If you have a certain amount of savings in a bank, you get an annual rent on that amount. For this income, the hours of work you have to put in to earn that rent is absolutely nothing. This is income is literally income that comes from doing nothing – there is no work in the sense of earning wage involved. However: the bigger the amount, the bigger the annual rent. In our society today, some people reek in extremely high benefits, simply because from the start they have owned a much bigger amount then you. So even if you worked really hard your whole life, put all your earnings in a savings account, you couldn’t catch up with them – while they often didn’t put an ounce work into it to get it, they often just inherited their wealth. And the work they put in to get even more money is, again, literally nothing. Every year the money just stacks up, piles up, automatically. And the only reason they get this share is simply that they are the owners of the wealth – they have a little paper that tells us it’s theirs. But what is important, it’s certainly not because they work hard for it; absolutely not – it’s nothing more exhausting than the effort you put in to get your few hundred dollars annual rent on your savings – which is mainly just sitting and waiting.
So if you agree that a just redistribution must be based on the amount of work everyone puts in, you’ll also agree that if in a society some people do more work than others, they should get a bigger share of the total yield.
But then you’ll also agree that if everyone puts in the same amount of work, everyone should get the exact same share of the amount. If you both put in the same amount of work, why should you get a lesser share? Now, in society where in one part of the economy everyone does exactly the same amount of work – namely nothing – shouldn’t everyone get the same share of the benefits that this doing nothing it yields?
Economic-equality is therefore not taking the money from people who work hard, and giving it to those who are lazy and do nothing. It is about redistributing the income from the wealth that comes from doing nothing. Everybody is capable of doing nothing, and if this yields an income, everybody is entitled to it. At the very least, I would say, if nobody put in anymore work than anyone else, than there is no reason for them to be entitled to a bigger share of the income than anyone else.
Crude Thinking 