re: scope of causality
The problem both you and Robert have is such a cartoonish idea of what a conservative/libertarian/classical liberal is that most of the painstaking details you flesh out the concepts with are pretty much useless.
Again, taking things down to the basics, if a liberal can neutralize concepts like "earn," "merit" and other things that might imply that a person maybe, just maybe, deserves the wealth he has, then it become much easier to justify stripping it from them to serve their own purposes--mostly gaining and keeping political power.