Bahahah. Your current neurochemical high will wear off in 2 days.

Current? The event happened months ago, I only wrote it down now, I hope it's obvious you can't keep this up 24/7. A silly example: I learned to put on and take off my jacket while walking the stairs. Saves me few seconds every time I go out. It's a habit now and, most importantly, it was fun to pick that habit up. It's boring to cleanup a desk. It's fun to try to cleanup a desk with only one hand within 20 seconds.

The story is just a feed for thought, it's up to the reader to figure out what works for him.

How about an architect walking his clients though their soon-to-be house?

I just used charity as an example; the same argument applies to taxes as well.

That does not follow. Why would I care about money I have no control over? Why would a politician care about efficiency over publicity? Why wouldn't the recipient try to take more than he needs? There's no incentive for anyone to do anything right.

Is that right?

Yes, that's correct. I'm arguing that redistribution in any form of giving "stuff" for free makes it worse by providing strong incentives to maintain status quo.

I can't shake off the impression that you're implicitly assuming the thesis. I'll try to answer what I can.

In this account, how did I get so much more healthy, wealthy, and educated than you are?

Why the implicit assumption that redistribution has a net positive impact here? Another implicit assumption here is that we're all born equal. Genetics aside, don't the children inherit the mindset of their close ones to a large degree? Aren't societies semi-stable, self-reinforcing, whatever their current wellbeing is? Africa is still poor, despite years of foreign aid. Middle east is still fighting, despite years of foreign interventions... What you need to do is to create incentives to break out of the current state of things and survival instinct is an excellent incentive which can be applied to poor people. What redistribution does is removing this powerful incentive and creating opposite ones. Basically, you're rewarding people for making poor economic decisions.

Is there any way to do whatever that was to you, as well

Assuming it was redistribution that made you wealthy and educated, does it work reliably on the majority of poor people? Without forcing them somehow out of their current environment? That's along the same lines of thought as that giving someone a million dollars reliably makes them a millionaire.

Would it have similarly been better to let me die (or kill me) before doing whatever it was that made me so much more healthy, wealthy, and educated?

This argument only makes sense if you already believe that redistribution reliably works, or anything reliably works, for that matter. People are notoriously difficult to change.

Of course I won't argue against effective altruism or charity and I suppose charity is technically a kind of "wealth redistribution". However, it's different than taxes in one very important way: it's redistributing excess wealth after my own goals have been achieved, not before.

redistribution of wealth and other oppression-proofing liberal policies

You're a healthy, wealthy, educated person. Being educated, you know you shouldn't have more than, say 2 children, to be able to afford their education and ensure their good standard of living. You'll have first child at age 25+.

I'm poor and uneducated third-world citizen. Being uneducated I don't know how many children I can afford. Or I just don't care, don't think about it. I'll have my first child at age of 18.

Now you give me half of your wealth and now you can only afford one child.

25 years from now you and your one educated child have to support me, 8 of my uneducated children... and 40 of my uneducated grandchildren. Your child can't afford having children at all.

This is what redistribution does, exaggerated. You're assuming the person you'll give wealth to will use it in a sane way from your point of view. They won't. You don't want to admit the possibility that it may be long term better to let them die to stop this. Of course this is not ideal, not even good. Ideally you'd teach them, but will they listen?

Not necessarily. The brain pattern-matches continuous sensory experiences to something already known, which is discrete. I tend to think about it as rounding-to-nearest. Blood gradually transforming into water before your eyes doesn't make sense to the mind.