It is further assumed that the ability to do this is facilitated by such psychological attributes as intelligence, ambition, perserverance, industry, courage, creativity and all the other values our society holds in such high esteem. The corollary to this is that if you have wealth, you must also possess these characteristics.

(emphasis added)

No reasonable person has ever submitted that corollary (a classic example of trying to reverse a logical statement along the lines of "all cats are mammals") as a valid proposition, and in fact, the only place I ever see something like that said is in some liberal's cartoonish representation of they think a conservative believes.

In addition, the market value one has in a society often has little or nothing to do with the objective value of what one produces, and it's simple to find many examples proving this.

You could quite plausibly say that the work of a fireman is more important than the work of a star basketball player. But who walks off with the millions? Seems unfair.

But when you look at it from the cold perspective of market value, as opposed to moral or objective value, it's quite easy. A lot more good people are qualified to be firemen than there are to be star basketball players. Add to that that people will pay a lot more to watch a basketball game than they will to a fire department, which in our current tax-supported environment is perceived as "free."

You can follow this up the scale. A heart surgeon still gets less than a basketball player, but very good heart surgeons aren't that common either, so their salaries don't exactly suck. Don't know what will happen if medical care becomes tax supported, and is perceived as "free." That's another issue.

At the far end, you can easily see that a famous Nobel-winning scientist's work can be objectively more important than, for example, the work of a star basketball player. Yet the latter is a multimillionaire, while the most money the former usually ever sees is from that check he got at Stockholm.

Again, Nobel Prize winning scientists aren't that much more common than star basketball players, but unfortunately a lot more people will pay to see a game than they will pay to read a science paper. It is nice to think that the scientist may start a bioengineering company to ease himself into the market area, and get rich. It has happened.

Moving to some of your other points, it is a capital mistake to try and draw analogies between historical wealth redistribution and modern wealth redistribution. Capitalism has an exact meaning, and its full attainment is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. It doesn't take much to see that Bill Gates and Marie Antoinette attained their positions in two entirely different ways. Add to that the fact that Bill Gates, as far as I know, can't have people imprisoned or executed at his whim. In fact, the lowliest local zoning official has more control over my life than Bill Gates does.