"was productive" is doing a hilarious amount of work in that sentence.

i don't really understand attempts like these to back-propagate some narrative that there was an epic, fair struggle between some set of individuals and one came out on top, ergo that justifies their estate all the way until the modern day owning some ridiculous share of the world's wealth

seems way more likely that once particular individuals amassed slight advantages in power, they just leveraged it into gaining even more ungodly amounts of power, often times using the state itself as a weapon to manifest that outcome

it's almost like you need to have access to capital to really make it big

hmm, that sounds strangely like what's going on in 2020... probably a coincidence though

Then just keep tracing it back up the hierarchy to a single common ancestor, declare that without that ancestor, none of the productivity would have been possible, and by the transitivity of worth that you've described, where one is indefinitely ascribed benefit of his or her acestors, everyone should have equal right to the output.

> ...all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

While this is technically true, this doesn't require that the beneficiary was the productive person. The textbook example of this would be those that accumulate wealth from the increasing value of unimproved land.

So why are you being particularly lax about the parasitic wealthy who inherited the vast majority of their assets?