There is more than enough wealth to feed and house everyone, so the issue is not of contribution, but distribution.

And boy oh boy, are things badly distributed. Look at the graphs of worker productivity compared to average wage for the last hundred years - they are staggering.

That's right - "the idle rich" is not just a saying.

Citation? I'd like you to be right, but my subjective experience is that a lot of them pretty much do.

And then you start hitting a sliding scale, and poor health, poverty, lack of transportation and/or wheelchair access, and a slew of other things makes it really easy to wind up being the person that sits at home. The other unfortunate reality is that some of the folks are sitting because they are dying. I've not yet died, but I suspect it tires you.

I also don't think this is a trend that will stay: I'm 42, and I have a completely different relationship to television than my mother. Unlike her, I rarely sit down and simply watch a show - and I know lots of folks like this. Games and hobbies and communication with others and all this other stuff is going on. And assuming we can still use our fingers and wrists well enough, I think this will stay.

Living as a species takes work - granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well.

If that won't end well, I genuinely look forwards to seeing how we deal with them.

Bingo. They didn't do shit to deserve it, they didn't work hard, and there's an entire industry of smart, morally ambiguous people dedicated to helping them hide it and keep it, and (as Abigail Disney discusses) convincing them that they deserve it, that poor people would simply waste it.

granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well Well, there they are, doing just that.

Once you get to a certain amount of wealth, you don't need to do anything. Smart trades? None of that's needed. I'm a tiny little part of it; I work full-time, but once my personal wealth reached about six times my salary, it made more money each year than I did. Six times [0]. That is pennies in the big scheme of things. There's nothing smart about my trades; dull funds and diversity. Piketty was on to something; Bill Gates made more money from being rich than he ever did from Microsoft. Maybe he deserved all his riches from Microsoft, but does he now also deserve to sit back, do nothing, and perpetually watch his wealth grow more and more obscenely by taking a part of the wealth generated by people actually working? How about his Grandchildren? Do they deserve that? Young was right; meritocracy is what we've got, and this is what it does - the rich shall inherit the earth.

Also, you seems to be applying that there is a fixed pie wealth.

I disagree. I made no such "application", as you put it. Implying, I guess you mean, but I still disagree. There is not a fixed pie wealth. Every day, a lot of people are creating more and more wealth, and the very wealthy every day sit back and rake in a nice helping of it for themselves. As I also do, and I'm not remotely near very wealthy.

Rob the rich and give to the poor is also a terrible strategy.

How about "make them at least pay taxes like the poor schlubs generating the wealth they're perpetually helping themselves to?" Is that a better strategy? How about "alter the system a bit so that labour pays better than simply being rich, or at least benefits the labourer ahead of the rich?" That one probably sounds like batshit crazy communist land.

[0] It's ridiculous, but it's true. I don't do calls, I don't do puts, most of it is in dull index funds and a big chunk of the rest is in slightly less dull fund offerings from Baillie Gifford and the like. Once you get some capital, it will happily act like a leech on society, siphoning off wealth generated by other people's work into your own pocket. I ride on the very, very long tail of this system set up to benefit the rich; I only hope that I die before their endless squeeze catches up with me as well.

Granted, obviously the current system is not perfect and does need a mechanism to make the rich pay their fair share in the economy. But saying all the rich just inherited their wealth and they did nothing to deserve it is plain incorrect.

This is how the poor stay poor, and those who are "just broke" become poor. In fact, people who are working are much more likely to engage in other community activities and volunteer.

If you gave a poor person the opportunity to become rich through work, would they still decide to stay poor?

When you are being rewarded for hard work it is hard to grasp the concept that some not all people are being rewarded for hard work. Pretty much every entrepreneur falls into that trap. Everything they do can have a direct impact to their bottom line so they work hard and long hours. Meanwhile they wonder why their employees with low wages that are often below planned minimum wage increases do the bare minimum to not get fired. It is pretty obvious. They are going on a silent strike as that is the last drip of their bargaining power. We then get lessons that the poor are poor because of laziness.

I can definitely say that people who are forced to work with capricious scheduling, or those that have to work more than one job just to survive are a lot less likely to do that.

Who doesn't? But we are not in a post-scarcity economy.