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Notes -
Indeed, it's also the murder of those people if they won't.
The earliest recorded socialist was Cain, who believed (trivially, correctly) that Abel was obtaining God's favor with resources that don't belong to him.
The first act of socialism ever practiced by humanity was redistributing Abel all over the ground.
From Cain's perspective, Abel obtaining God's favor that way was stealing (and purposefully ignores "obtaining God's favor" is the entire reason those resources were put there in the first place: "obtaining God's favor" and "being better than Cain" were one and the same for Cain, though).
Interestingly, the punishment for that was not death, but exile and divine protection from anyone else murdering him. (And the even more interesting implication is that Cain having done this doesn't seem to be stated as categorically/unequivocally evil, either.)
In what way did the resources not belong to him?
You might assert that Abel does not own his sheep in the sense that nobody can own any natural resources, because all resources, animals, plants, etc., are created by God. But Cain does not seem to have objected to Abel having a flock of sheep in the conventional, everyday sense of the term.
Moreover joking about 'redistribution' here seems like just a bad interpretation of the text? Cain's motive is not to steal any of Abel's material goods. Cain does not take Abel's sheep, nor even Abel's physical body. It's hard to read as a 'redistribution' of God's favour, because there is no reason for Cain to think that murdering Abel will somehow cause God to favour Cain. On the contrary, Cain attempts to conceal his actions from God. It looks to me like Cain (correctly) believes that God would look upon his act with disfavour.
Surely the traditional reading of this text, where Cain was motivated by envy, hatred, and pride, just makes more sense? Abel had done well, and Cain was envious, and that envy curdled into bitterness and despising. He killed Abel not as part of some strategic move to take anything that belonged to Abel, for Cain makes no attempt to take anything of Abel's. Nor does he make any suggestion that Abel committed an injustice. Cain was angry that Abel had been favoured more than he had been. That was it. That was the whole cause.
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