Poppies, it seems your concern assumes that large collections of wealth would be sustainable in an anarchistic arrangement. As AJ pointed out, with out the grants of privilege backed by the force of the government, a wealth accumulating system faced with constantly defending its acquired wealth from endless competitors could only grow to a certain size before it would be faced with diminishing returns from further expansion. As Jeffery Tucker pointed out in his lecture “The Evils of Intellectual Property”, the completely unchecked market will constantly “drive all profits to zero” with invention/innovation the only check.
That’s really a great point. This is why it’s so valuable to post in this forum, being able to access the aggregate thoughts of so many who have worked through these issues is a great benefit.
There is an important distinction between “want” and “demand”. Lets assume that Paul sees that John is much wealthier than he is, and rightly so; he shall probably want to eliminate part of this difference.
Yet, can he move from “want” to “demand”? Shall the costs he’ll face make up for whatever psychic gains he wishes to make? Can he rally enough “pauls” to his cause? Does he even have the stomach to admit to himself this loathing of John, let alone act upon such an urge? Normally I’d except the “lower quartiles” of the population, under anarchy as under statism, to be pretty much spineless beings, unable to truly organize anything. And it is these guys that would create a redistributive State?!
Perhaps than someone uses this latent anger towards the rich to his purposes, thus organizing the otherwise spineless masses. But will this gifted leader be foolish enough not to see that by redistributing wealth he only destroys his trade partners? Or that only he, as the new leader, can become the next target of the mob? Can intelligence and stupidity be so much intertwined in a single human?
Finally, I’d say that redistributive States are a recent development, whereas every State at its very beginning had no redistributive function at all, just a pretty much even tax collection operation, Should envy drive the State, we’d expect Social Security to have been implemented in Babylon, not XIX century Germany.
History shows that States are creations of a few, not of the masses.
Thus, it is a good point you raise and no definitive answer can be given. Yet, everything would seem to work against the possibility of envy-driven state creation.