I agree that systemic exploitation by carving out an unfair advantage is a bad thing and that it happens frequently right now. I talked about it in another comment in this thread. [0]

However, even if we agree that someone's gains were based on unfair rules, that's not justification for pilfering a family's nest egg. If we allowed them to accrue that money legally, it's theirs, and we just need to correct the loopholes and move on.

Dismantling the free markets and systems of exchange enabled by private property only results in shifting every advantage to a tiny centralized core (usually government ministers, bureaucrats, and their families and staffs) who quickly grow rich while 90%+ of the population becomes impoverished. It is simply not possible for any government to produce a sufficient central plan, no matter how well-meaning or knowledgeable the planners. The world's natural chaos doesn't allow for it.

We saw this tried many times in the 20th century and there's not one success story to come out of it. People must be free to make their own price and value judgments in an organic marketplace because it's the only thing that can adapt quickly enough to the real world, and the only thing that actually provides some advantage resilience to keep a dishonest, exploitative pirate class from pillaging the economy with stunning rapidity. Ask yourself why this clear fact is often misrepresented as its polar opposite, and consider the interests of the propagandists with reference to that misrepresentation.

There is too much inequality today. We should work to fix that, but no one seems interested in paying attention to the details that are necessary to do so because the propagandists are too busy whipping them into a frenzy about the need to confiscate the assets of the 1% and transfer control of that money to their friends in the government.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13566113

>We saw this tried many times in the 20th century and there's not one success story to come out of it.

Mid-20th-century America seemed pretty damned successful, and it involved very high income taxes at the top, confiscatory inheritance taxes, and strong antitrust laws.

Also systemic racism of a kind nearly unimaginable today, cultural barriers to many jobs for half the population, and a world economy severely unbalanced in the US's favor by a World War.

Nostalgia for the era of "Mad Men" seems bizarre to me.

I'm not nostalgic. I think that the egalitarianism and shared prosperity of that era came from certain structural features it had, which can be replicated today, rather than from peculiar, one-time historical circumstances.