Controlling your own wealth as a basic human right
The misnomer in &quot;own wealth&quot; is in the word &quot;own&quot;.  The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society.   The only reason that its yours to control is because capitalism is a relatively efficient and natural way to allocate and control wealth.<p>Thought experiment: a world without history &amp; society.   7 billion people, with the resources of the world fairly divided amongst those 7 billion, but these people come into the world as blank adults without any knowledge of the past.<p>They&#x27;d quickly starve.   Even hunting and gathering requires a surprising amount of training to do successfully, and the world cannot support 7 billion people in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle.<p>Even if your Mom &amp; Dad taught you the skills of subsistence farming you&#x27;d still starve; we don&#x27;t have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques.<p>But for the sake of this argument let&#x27;s suppose your parents taught you how to farm and make your own tools, shelter, etc and you have enough land to live on.   Subsistence farming is something you can do on a heavily populated world without the knowledge or cooperation or interference of any others.   And it&#x27;s pretty much the only thing.<p>Anything else requires history &amp; society &amp; cooperation forced or unforced.<p>We&#x27;ve the inheritance of Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Borlaug, Caesar, Washington, Confucius and innumerable others.   We control the wealth because they&#x27;re all dead and we&#x27;ve inherited it.  We&#x27;re mice standing on the shoulders of giants.<p>Certainly we have all done something to be granted our wealth.   Some of us may have inherited it, but most of us do our 9-5 or more.   But what we do is such a small part compared to what came before.  We spent 12-20 years in school being taught by society, protected by society, enabled by society and learning from history, given to you by your employer or your customers.<p>It&#x27;s efficient and natural for you to control the wealth that comes into your hands; taxation and government implies a certain amount of waste.   But society has just as much of a claim as you do.   At least on any part more than that of a subsistence farmer.