"Firstly, one can easily argue force to take wealth is already in place." That's exactly what I had in mind just maybe was not clear enough. Welfare economics/s

"Firstly, one can easily argue force to take wealth is already in place." That's exactly what I had in mind just maybe was not clear enough. Welfare economics/socialism has a lot of support on emotional level and it is understandable that people who might be struggling are asking questions like in this thread. But if we are discussing economic policies we want to implement then a simple analysis and understanding on the very basics on how things work quickly reveals that it's not as simple as "lets take it from the rich and give it to the poor and everyone will be happy". Taxes are necessary but I would argue that welfare is not what it should be used for at all. About empirical evidence of socialism failures - countless examples where underdeveloped countries tried it - Russia & co (some not voluntary like my country Lithuania), Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua (and actually majority of south/central America so no need to list all of them), Somali, Libya (and actually mostly all worst African states where USSR were heavily involved no need to list it), good latest example from Africa is Zimbabwe, from Asia largest one is India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, Laos etc. Basically any poor country you can think of - it will have a history of some form of socialism. Nice example is China. You can compare it to Taiwan and Hong Kong. Also you can compare China 50 years ago and now (despite being communist on paper now it's one of the most capitalist countries in the world in reality and it's very good for them). North vs South Korea. Just too many examples. Redistribution simply does not create any wealth. Some very rich countries can get away with it but even current day Sweden on the very top on ease to do business lists. And Sweden is already very rich so they have something to redistribute (https://mises.org/library/sweden-myth https://mises.org/library/sweden-myth) I guess we look at 19th century extremely differently. For me it was as laissez-faire as probably possible. Current levels of redistribution and inefficiency of it would have been unimaginable back then. We should be very thankful for our ancestors who were working so so so hard. We are currently standing on the shoulders of those giants that started this exponential growth of technology that improved our lifes so much in the last couple hundred of years. Especially USA which to this day is world's economical, industrial, technological and innovation locomotive. Even logical arguments why redistribution though taxes are working for me seems like mental gymnastics and doesn't really much sense. Why would would someone should be efficient with someone else's money even if he has good intentions? Why would redistribution create larger pie to everyone? 19 century is a great example to me how human potential can be unleashed with freedom (from a lot of things at that time - religion, taxes, regulation etc). I don't disagree with your conclusion. I would avoid left vs right labels though. There is some unavoidable reality on how the world works and labels clouds our judgment and we make emotional decision based on what is "morally" right or wrong and not adapting and working with what we actually have in reality. Every country is actually capitalistic (including USSR and North Korea). The only difference is who control that capital. It's ironic that in capitalist countries it's usually controlled by people (people of merit who often are creators and innovators) and in "communist" countries it is controlled by "government" - usually people with no merit and very often very evil ones. The ones who are good at getting at the top in the power pyramid. Where do you think computer would be invented and would reach all the regular folks?