This is a philosophically consistent system.

So what’s the consistent principle? It’s not self-ownership. As I’ve shown, your philosophy restricts self-ownership.

There is no moral difference between either of Billy’s activities and Bill Gates

Why am I bothering to respond if you’re not even reading what I’m saying? Of course there is a difference. As I’ve pointed out, I believe that we should do whatever helps people and the system we must use to help people is government. If everyone was allowed use their own discretion to distribute property, that would lead to chaos. That’s why we have we have a system of representative government, that weighs each side both by the number of people affected and the extent to which they are affected, and resolves the conflict in favor of the greater concern. So taxation is great. Bob and his buddies are not.

My approach is to penalize bad behavior.

False, your approach incentivizes bad behavior, like greed, deception, collusion, and the creation of barriers to entry.

If people can’t be trusted to rule themselves well, why on earth would we expect them to rule others better?

You see, that’s the kind of silly black and white thinking that you libertarians love. No, people are not inherently good- OR evil. In fact, I would agree that most people are pretty good at heart. That’s why we trust most people to keep the minority of wrongdoers in check through our representative government.

However, it’s pretty obvious- and I think most libertarians would agree- that most people prioritize their own concerns over others. You think that’s fine, because selfishness in the market supposedly helps people. But that’s false, as I’ve shown- selfishness allows people to ignore those who aren’t as privileged as they are. It incentivizes fraud, collusion, exploitation of externalities, and the creation of barriers to entry. That is exactly what we saw in the Gilded Age.

In contrast, selfishness works out great when you have a representative government. Everyone may look out for themselves, but that’s completely fine. Unlike in the market, everyone has an equal say.

Yeah, Lie #7 is just bad economics.

And you go on to talk about…2 of the 11 statistics that I quoted.

Women actually make almost the exact same amount as men, when you control for years of experience and field of work.

First of all, that’s not really true. Second of all, why are you controlling for field of work? Do traditionally female fields of work require less work, or provide less value to society? No, they do not. Men just value them less, showing that neither work nor contribution to society determine your wages.

If somebody is smarter, than we would expect them to produce higher quality work, and therefore earn more

You see, there’s your fallacy- if a poor person produces low quality work because they were born with a low IQ, they obviously should NOT earn less and starve as a result. People should be rewarded for the honest effort they put in to create quality, not the actual quality. You only can control your effort.

$80k is a middle class salary.

That’s the average, and it shows a serious inequality of opportunity.

Income mobility is a real thing.

If by a real thing, you mean that wealth isn’t 100% stagnant, then yes, you are correct. If you mean that there’s anything close to equality of opportunity in a capitalist society, then my statistics should definitely disabuse you of that notion.

Look, here’s the deal. Maybe a couple of the rich guys actually did work 1000 times harder than a couple of the poor guys we are distributing to. Maybe that is not ideal. But you can’t deny that there are definitely a significant amount of people who work hard, trying to succeed, that just aren’t successful. In the Gilded Age, they lived miserable lives, and many of them died. Is that what you want to go back to? Is their plight really less important than the handful of hardworking rich people who will part with a couple dollars? I really hope that you don’t think it is.