>I've paid roughly half of all of my life's production in taxes, and much of this goes to providing these safety nets. I've additionally written grants and made

>I've paid roughly half of all of my life's production in taxes, and much of this goes to providing these safety nets. I've additionally written grants and made other large gifts to support others. The amount I have left to live on might be less than 10% of the value of my work product. Without specifics, and there is no need for them here to be clear, your emphasis on capital as means to create wealth speaks to your work product actually being compensation for a number of other people laboring to create wealth, in addition to whatever labor you contributed. What really happened there is a lot of labor was performed, wealth created and the laborers compensated for your use of their time for something you then own. At no time did capital create anything. Labor did. As for paying for safety nets, of course! A lot of people labored on your behalf, and ideally their compensation for that labor was enough for them to meet their costs and risks and maybe have some left over for their own purposes. A lot of people labor as much as they can, and that does not happen. This makes those safety nets quite expensive! And it can be objectionable. When the product of labor is high enough to accumulate capital, should hose actually creating it at least not be doing so for less compensation than it costs them to perform the labor? Secondly, why should others subsidize all that? They have their own purposes to get after. >Your suggestion that we might need to ignore basic economic realities to provide for others simply doesn't follow. We don't need to do things that way and when we have, historically, it has never succeeded. I made no such suggestion. What I did do was clarify both the nature of wealth and how is is created. I then spoke to value and potential harm, and benefit. One harm is mentioned above, and that is the overall increase in everyone's cost and risk due to underfunded labor. There are others.