It is true what you say when you are talking about the mega rich that they can do a lot to help and that is what people like Bill Gates etc are doing without an

It is true what you say when you are talking about the mega rich that they can do a lot to help and that is what people like Bill Gates etc are doing without anyone legislating them to do so. When it comes to wealth distribution, I can not see any better way of doing it than letting the markets manage it. Where the governments and charity's come in should be in efficient exception handling dealing with the various emergencies the real world raises. Don't misunderstand me though. "Rich" people are not necessarily nice people and often are not believers in free markets. They are often directly in cahoots with government and make lots of money being invested in the status quo. The problem with just about every single attempt at taxing this little tiny group of extremely rich people is that in the end it hardly affects them, but almost always harm the entrepreneurs who aren't yet at the Billionaire level. (Excuse my CS metaphors) My own country Denmark got rich by having an open economy with little redistribution but plenty of exception handling. Since the late 60s the focus shifted from exception handling to having a heavy handed kernel process maintaining resource sharing in realtime which now counts for over half the economy. This has stagnated the economy, which currently only looks better than Greece because of our oil resources. We are an extremely equal country, with only a small handful of outliers. End result to maintain our equality many of the smart coders/entrepreneurs now live abroad (eg. DHH, Rasmus Lerdorf) while more and more resources are being spent beating immigrants into being as equals as the rest of us to which we are now being rightly condemned throughout the world. A little thought experiment to which I do not know the answer: What part of Bill Gates deeds will over history have done more to multiply peoples quality of life in the developing world? The Bill and Melinda Gates foundations good work throughout the world or the millions of pirated Windows copies used throughout the developing world in everything from small businesses to internet cafe's to schools.