> And when you made the envious people outright psychotically homicidal, was that for a bit of levity? More like realism. Read a history book sometime. The ma

> And when you made the envious people outright psychotically homicidal, was that for a bit of levity? More like realism. Read a history book sometime. The main difference between your parable and mine is that yours assumes a zero-sum world in which there is a fixed number of apples that are grown and the only question is how to divide them. In reality, that’s not how it works. In reality, wealth can be created. A greedy person is a problem if he takes things away from other people, but if he does productive work that creates more wealth for the world, even we allow him to keep much of that wealth for himself, the rest of us are still better off with him around than without. Conversely, if we destroy him or his ability to create wealth out of a shortsighted envy because we falsely believe in a zero-sum world, we also ultimately impoverish ourselves out of spite. Even your own parable ends up proving my point. Your parable is essentially the “tragedy of the commons”, and the point of the tragedy of the commons is that when productive assets (like apple trees) are commonly owned, the individual incentives go against the common good and also the stewardship of the asset. Conversely, if the orchard is private property, the owner’s incentives instead favor both of these things. This is why virtually all productive agricultural land is privately owned and worked for profit, and if you look back at those same history books I mentioned earlier, most attempts to abolish private ownership of farmlands—most of which were ideologically motivated by various rationalizations for envy—have resulted in lower food production and often outright famine.