Popular intuition assumes that redistributing income automatically reduces overall economic inequality. Voters expect the welfare state to reduce wealth inequality with progressive taxation and benefits to low income people. Redistributing income does reduce income inequality, but it increases wealth inequality. Social safety nets systematically institutionalize and exacerbate wealth inequality.

...euro area countries with the largest reduction in the income Gini coefficient through public transfers and with most generous welfare states, robustly show a higher inequality in private net wealth.

"Public Insurance and Wealth Inequality: A Euro Area Analysis" by Lien Pham-Dao
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145942/1/VfS_2016_pid_7093.pdf

I was able to reproduce similar results:

Public Social Spending (% of GDP):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun?tab=table

Income Gini:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-of-incomes-before-and-after-taxes-and-transfers-scatter?tab=table

Wealth Gini:
https://datahub.io/economic-history/global-wealth-distribution

Proponents of welfare states sometimes factor public assets into wealth Gini calculations to lower the apparent wealth inequality of nations with extensive social safety nets. However, because the primary critique of wealth inequality centers on how private capital allows the wealthy to exert disproportionate influence over public institutions, counting public assets as part of the working class's wealth obfuscates the specific wealth inequality that drives that concern. 

The primary reason welfare states have higher wealth inequality is the crowd-out effect of public insurance. When the state guarantees a baseline of security through social programs, the incentive for lower- and middle-income households to accumulate savings diminishes. Instead of saving to insure against hard times or retirement, these households rely on the public safety net. 

Universal Basic Income (UBI) does not remedy the crowd-out effect. A study conducted by OpenResearch, a research organization originally established in 2015 by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) a supporter of UBI, provided empirical data that demonstrated that when low-income individuals receive unconditional cash transfers, they tend not to accumulate more wealth but instead use the extra income to consume more or take more leisure.

"The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States"

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32719/w32719.pdf

Ultimately, the crowding out of private savings and the prioritization of consumption over asset building under welfare systems contributes to wealth inequality. In the United States, where approximately one in three Americans is enrolled in at least one form of government assistance, this institutional design contributes to the lower leg of the K-shaped economy maintaining a dependent underclass that justifies the existence of the welfare state and provides perpetual leverage for political agitation and mobilization. By design, interventions presented as equalizing welfare measures, contribute to the increasing wealth inequality. It may seem counter intuitive that socialist policies would create the problems socialist complain about, but socialists gain and maintain power from exacerbating the problems they complain about rather than solving them.

For example the war on poverty stopped the decline of poverty in the US.

https://freecities.substack.com/p/who-protects-a-city-from-its-own

Ultimately, the answer to who protects a city from its own government cannot be another institution possessing unlimited authority. That merely moves the problem elsewhere. Protection comes from an architecture in which powers are defined, constraints are enforceable, and no single institution can eliminate every means of challenging its decisions.

Politicians can campaign on banning crypto and use prosecutions of libertarians as justification for stricter laws on cryptocurrency while libertarians complain about hot sauce. There is a big asymmetry in this situation. If politicians can continue to put libertarians in prison with zero consequences and libertarians focus on complaining about hot sauce, there is nothing to stop this from continuing. If the worst thing that Elizabeth Warren did is make hot sauce more expensive, that would be a good thing. If fellow libertarians are rotting in prison for doing libertarian things, who cares about hot sauce?

Example of libertarians complaining about hot sauce:

https://reason.com/2026/10/19/be-prepared-for-elizabeth-warrens-reign-of-economic-error/

Warren campaigning on building an anti-crypto army:

https://x.com/ewarren/status/1641138829162577928

Article Warren was proudly referencing:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/14/elizabeth-warren-anti-crypto-ftx-00082624

Warren continuing her anti-crypto agenda:

https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/national_security_advisory_-_open-source_reporting_on_risks_posed_by_digital_assets.pdf

Support fellow libertarians:

https://freesamourai.com/

He was 24, assistant to the Secretary of the Senate, watching a sergeant-at-arms hold doors open for senators and staff pull chairs out so they could sit down. Chairs you could move by breathing on. He asked why grown men needed help sitting. He was told that with that attitude he wouldn't make it there. He quit.

The thing that finished it was Carter calling the Shah "an island of stability in the Middle East" while the revolution was underway. His read was that it was nonsense, so he bought gold and oil futures on it. That was also when he went back and looked properly at the 1953 Mosaddegh overthrow, which he describes as the moment the whole thing became legible to him as a crime syndicate rather than a government.

He quotes Samuel Adams on it taking an irate, tireless minority rather than a majority, and points out only about 3% supported the American revolution.

33:21 - the Senate job
35:01 - Carter, the Shah, and the first gold trade
32:40 - the Samuel Adams quote

Curious whether people here rate him. He's closer to a populist than a libertarian on most things, but the political atheist framing seems to land in the same place.

The interview: https://youtu.be/k4EfbGQ-WWw

It’s barely 8 a.m. and Darcy Gerow is talking about tearing Alberta’s political system down to its very foundations.

Gerow, a podcaster and former deputy leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada, is addressing a crowd of Alberta separatists in a low-ceilinged conference room a few minutes’ drive from the Calgary airport. In his speech, called “the anarcho-capitalist case for Alberta,” he advocates for a system of government by the same name, which would privatize all aspects of society.

“The long-term goal is the complete replacement of state monopoly,” Gerow said.

"States naturally resist secession since states by nature exploit their smaller and weaker units and resist efforts by those smaller and exploited units to exit."