okay so i feel like i sometimes see people critiquing various anti-capitalist complaints by saying “look, you can’t redistribute Musk’s/Bezos’s/Gates’/whoever’s wealth the way you think; investment valuations and total wealth valuations are complicated and situation specific, and if you suddenly tried to give everybody an equal portion of a random rich guy’s wealth, you’d destroy most if not all of it.”

and this is true if your interlocutor thinks wealth is literally a scrooge mcduck-style pool of money. i think most people who engage in politics discourse online don’t think that’s the case though. and i don’t think it’s an incoherent position to be like “look, insofar as it means anything, the wealth whose value we estimate in dollars is capital; capital, whether it’s in the form of abstract investments like stocks or physical stuff like land and factories is a claim on the future productivity of society; and one person having an oversized claim on that future productivity is bad, either because it’s intrinsically immoral or because it has some negative consequence X. therefore, we can and should redistribute that claim, whether it’s in the form of some simpler mechanism like taxes or some more complicated process like reorganizing society completely.”

like you might disagree with that. you can have lots of substantive, vociferous disagreements with people who think that. but acting like the concept of redistribution is meaningless because wealth isn’t a fixed amount of dollars in a bank account is both wrong and probably misapprehends the nature of the disagreement you’re having.