The wealth always gets redistributed. The only question is when and how.

Before there's something to redistribute, that something needs to be created. Productive people do not need and do not depend on redistribution of wealth, they create it. Crooks and collectivists on the other hand, are only capable of redistributing someone else's wealth.

No one is suggesting taking the means of production and distributing it to the proletariat, so no you won't. It is literally impossible to get to Marxist communism through taxation. Communism is much more than simple wealth redistribution. It's about collective power and collection ownership of the means of economic growth. Progressive taxation is absolutely not that unless maybe it's a 100% or higher ... but that kind of ceases to be a tax and starts looking a lot like the state seizing people's property.

Why think of ways to improve society when we could just keep suffering through what we have now?

Do you not think society is improving? Over the past 20 years we had the greatest drop of poverty ever seen.

Everyday society is improving.

For whom? In the US, we just had four years of people saying their lives were not improving and they had been left behind.

So they voted for an administration that would keep things that way. The world is weird.

95% of us aren’t American. And while I would never blame Americans for voting for an American government specifically on the basis of what they promise do for American citizens and without regard for the consequences for the rest of us, the overall effect on the world to which rich Americans can flee has been more up than down.

It reminds me of Mark Fisher's line that the problem with capitalism is it leaves no room to imagine alternatives.

Right now, in America, you have more people suffering from poverty than you have people with wealth. You also have taxation which is regressive, not progressive -- which was what brought on the French Revolution.

We can have empathy now, or we can be surprised later.

Empathy is something that is sorely lacking in a post-COVID world. Apparently some people decided that certain groups are simply vermin to be exterminated and have been quite open about their abuse. Empathy, for them, simply isn't on the menu, because they have been told that these people pose an existential threat. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine precisely who such parties are, and how this will end.