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If you look at a rich person and say "Hey, they must have gotten rich by imposing negative externalities on society, let's take their assets", then even if you theoretically admit the existence of rich people who "absolutely deserve the wealth that they have generated", that's not nuance, it's a cynical demand for leveling. If you're wearing a blindfold while searching for your virtuous rich man, you certainly don't want to find him.
I have never once said we should take rich people's assets, I'm not a Marxist or a redistributionist. However I can understand why so many are eager to paint me with that brush.
I'd simply like to raise awareness that wealth and money do not equal virtue, and in many cases are anti-correlated. Instead of redistributing wealth, I think a better path would be having a conversation about negative externalities of the market and trying to figure out how to price those in.
On top of that, I'd like to see a scaling back of certain areas like religion and the sacred from markets entirely, although I'll admit having both at once would be a difficult challenge.
You don't have to connect the dots yourself if you place the points and draw arrows.
I think this is well-understood; the lack of awareness is the other way around. That no, having wealth doesn't mean you committed mortal sins to obtain it. That inequality of wealth is not something that in itself demands solutions.
Externalities are almost by definition hard to measure, and it's very easy to put your finger on the scale by picking which ones to measure and assigning arbitrary values to them. And there's not much point in discussion when you've already decided they net out to "dumping horrid amounts of negative externality into the rest of society".
The point of the discussion, and my favored argument at the moment, is that markets have a use but should not be how we organize all wealth and value as a society. Pointing out critiques of a market system without crying out for the blood of the rich is an important stance from my viewpoint, and one that is sorely missing from the culture war conversation.
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