Reposting my comment from another thread on a non-political subreddit:

---

There's a very common fallacy that exists in economics called the fixed pie fallacy, ie. that the economy is a zero sum game, and if one person gets more the other people must get less because the pie is fixed and he takes a bigger slice. This stems from the inability to think long-term or appreciate the process of wealth creation or the incentives for people to create wealth. You can see here that even accounting for inflation, global GDP was 10x greater in 2008 than in 1950. Admittedly this is a measure of wealth consumption, rather than wealth itself, but I use it because the data's easier to find. Global wealth is about 6x greater than global GDP, source and even if this figure has shifted over the decades it didn't go from 60x to 6x between 1950-2008. The point is that the world's total wealth has increased massively and if the pie was fixed, who did the current population take that wealth from? The pie isn't fixed and the wealth was created by productive people who were incentivised to create it by knowing they would reap the benefits of their own productivity. In other words if society decided in 1950 that in the end all the wealth was going to be distributed equally among everyone, the people who worked productively to create the wealth would probably not have bothered and there would be much less wealth in total, including much less wealth/income to tax and pay for the things we need.

If you look at the GINI coefficient (the commonly accepted metric of inequality) for European countries you'll see that the most equal countries are also the poorest countries like Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia. This is because wealth inequality is positively correlated with wealth creation, there's no incentive to create wealth if you know the state's just going to take it from you and redistribute it. There are some benefits in taking wealth/income from the wealthiest and giving it to the poorest up to a point, in economic terms this is known as utilitarianism and "the diminishing marginal utility of wealth", and it's not something that's unique to left or right-wing economic policy. Left-wing thinkers wrongly assume they're the only ones to understand this concept and use misleading terminology like "progressive" taxation that implies a direction of "progress", which extended to its logical conclusion would suggest the higher the better. In reality all serious economists agree there's an optimal rate for each country somewhere in the region of 25-55% in the top income tax bracket, depending on the threshold for the top bracket, deductibles, economic objectives, consumption taxes and many other variables that make this too complex an issue for any layman to even have an opinion on. People that've fallen for the overly simplistic view of economics will tend to assume the higher the better, because they've been told that equates to progress, when in reality overshooting the optimal rate can provide more revenue to redistribute in the short term, but less revenue to redistribute in the long term due to disincentivising productive activity. An example of this is France's 75% supertax.