From HBO's Silicon Valley -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zQpN28xa4 -- I'll take the downvotes I deserve for trolling.

Though for the record, I'm fairly certain the hunters and wild animals analogy isn't intended as a complaint that he feels "hunted" or that he thinks people are out to hunt or kill startup founders in any literal or figurative sense [1].

The point of that anecdote in PG's essay is just that the counterparty to the argument doesn't have a clear objective. The Rick Webb open letter obviously uses it out of context to make PG look as if he's whining about being rich.

    [1] fun aside: yay those 2 words mean the same
        thing anyways now apparently anyways.
        http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_literally_now_also_means_figuratively_newscred/

The current structure and distribution of wealth is not meritocratic however. Whenever there is any talk of fixing the system, people want to start from the current level and declare things a meritocracy, without touching the gains anyone got from an non-level playing field before hand.

This is like saying "ok, there was a bug in World of Warcraft, that allowed a bunch of sophisticated people to level up unfairly. We've now fixed the bug, and the same is meritocratic now. However, we will not be taxing or nerfing any of the items that got duped or hacked by those who took advantage of the game flaws previously."

Saying you can't draw a line or make a definition is a fallacy. As a society, we can draw any lines we want, and what is just or ethical is defined by society. Imagine we didn't have any speed limits, would your argument be "it is impossible to define an appropriate speed limit, since the right speed limit varies by road condition, traffic, weather, etc. Is it 60 mph, or 62.49 mph? Since we can't come up with a scientific rule for this that holds, we may as well have no limit."

I'd go further and said the idea of defining the concept of "saying whatever they own and made justly" is flawed. What startup founder hasn't benefited from positive externality of others? If you invent a new drug, that is based on an insight you had reading a university journal, from a publicly financed university research center, and you make $1 billion on this insight, even though 95% of the hardc work was done by research scientists publishing openly, do you deserve to pocket this entire $1 billion while everyone else shoulders the burden of paying for the public research?

Is it too hard to just ask people not to be greedy douchebags who try to defend their earnings from a lottery ticket with libertarian philosophy, and just accept that success in this society, especially entrepreneurial success, is a complex function of many variables, only one of which is hard work, or intelligence, or coding skill? And that there are other huge pieces: your social network, your friends, where you were born, timing and plain old luck, and that it would be better to encourage a continuance of this lottery game, if more people had the resources to do it, and a social safety net to tolerate failure?

As Warren Buffet said (paraphrased), an entrepreneur isn't going to stop trying to get rich because of a 10 or 20% hike in marginal or capital gains taxes. That's absurd.

People will stop trying to get rich, if they don't have family with savings or capital to fall back on, and in which a failure will leave them destitute and broken.

Anything above median for your city is excess, anything under it is deficient. The question is at which point the excess should be taken, and the deficient subsidized. I'd roughly say 30% on either side of median.

However, not all that long ago, for ~40 years, the U.S. had a top tax bracket above 70%, for about a decade it was 94%. It was not such an exact system where to draw the line. But a line was drawn, and it was not 94% of all of your income, it was only the portion of your income that was above the previous bracket limit. It's not like you make $1 more and suddenly all your other income got hit with this much higher tax. So the fuck all for these hoarders. Start a new business, expand the current one, and you get a tax deduction. If you hoard, fuck you, we have ideas and ways to spend that money, we're taking it. Don't like it? Give up your citizenship. Go pay 70% in some other western civilized country. Or run for office and have your ideas dissected by the American public. Just quit your fucking bitching, whiners.

And meritocracy alone doesn't work. A lot of effective people are assholes who would let the world around the average person burn to the ground before they'd lift a finger. And even that would be delegated.

Politics is largely about allocating resources. There's nothing inherently more biased about the allocation decisions that lead to a more equal society.

Re 2: I'm not sure if you're trolling here. It's a fantastically complicated question and the economics has barely scratched the service. Strong proponents either side here, but there is certainly a lot of research linking inequality to poor social outcomes (higher crime, poor health) which in turn we tend to think negatively impact growth.

point 1 would be true in an ideal world, but at least in the US, its proven that millionaires/billionaires pay less taxes than the middle class. This is true of corporations as well.

also to add : in reality its just not true. Areas with higher property taxes in affluent areas, do have access to better quality public services. In many ways separate but equal is still reflected in public services that are accessible to communities

You said it (2), it must be true.

1. It's possible, however very unlikely, especially given what we've seen so far.

2. It very much is, as inequality limits what sectors of the population can grow.

4. PG wouldn't be in a position to have that comparison made if it wasn't for the services given by the State. Unless you're trying to say that he would have been just as successful growing up in the middle of Somalia.

All true. Income inequality isn't an economic problem. It's a political problem.