> It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution

Snark aside, my intent was to clarify what is loosely meant by "liberal" - the broad technical sense in the philosophical context and not the partisan/colloquial usage (which is something like "leftist", which is quite different; in the US, both dominant parties are liberal parties, and they disagree on questions like redistribution, with some tending more toward Mill on this issue, others Hayek, for example). It is not my intent to offer an exhaustive treatment of the variations of liberal positions (or an analysis of how they converge or diverge as they develop). Perhaps I should have avoided the term and simply stuck to "hyperindividualism" to avoid confusion.

However, I am opposed to redistribution as the basic mechanism of correcting what is a matter of basic justice. I am not arguing for equality or for redistribution as a normal corrective mechanism. I am arguing that if we bring back notions of economic justice, a correct understanding of what economies are for, of the relationship between the human person/society and the economy, and of our moral duties within the scope of economics, then we think less about how to slap a dirty bandage onto an open sore and think more about how not to wound in the first place. If workers made at least a family wage, you wouldn't need to worry so much about redistribution. If we didn't construe capital and labor as intrinsically in competition with one another, but rather as partners working toward a common good, we wouldn't obsess about class conflict and the socialistic impulse to eliminate class distinctions and flatten society.

I am suggesting we escape the false categories of our modern paradigm by reexamining our assumptions and looking at what an older and still very much alive vibrant intellectual tradition has to say.

Consider "Laborem Exercens" [0], which engages both capitalism and socialism without collapsing into either.

[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...