I am accepting your second counter-argument that people are free to choose the causes they support as sufficient.

I'm in agreement with your general point but a bit concerned about the specifics. Science and technology save huge numbers of lives and improve the lot of the poor dramatically. Those pushing the boundaries are doing the work that can have a beneficial effect orders of magnitude above what could be done with the money otherwise.

Ferrari is where I might well agree with you because they're also part of the wealth disparity problem but projects like Cern where great minds are pushing all the boundaries to better understand nature should only be stopped if there's better ways to achieve similar goals. (whether big projects are better than lots of smaller projects is a good question)

Logically there must be some cut off point where we are spending too much of present day wealth on future wealth (via science/the research) but nothing I've seen suggest that is remotely the case at the moment - the reverse is the case.

I don't understand this view when you look at history. Most great art and science flowed out of the selfish hoarding of wealth - had wealth been distributed non-outrageously-unfairly (in your view), wealth could not have thrown a javelin forward into the future and came back with fish. Science required stepping on the heads of the desperately poor to fund it. As did great art and the high culture of the Enlightenment, and the (necessarily) wasteful decentralized experimenting of the industrial revolution, which finally liberated the poor from miserable short lives. Your philosophy of wealth-hate seems like it would destroy these things.

I see the hoarding wealthy as the greatest force for good that exists in this world, and the greatest helpers of the poor (without actually donating to the poor). Why do we differ so much on our views?

Yesterday I wrote a synopsis of an interesting chapter in a classic anthropological text which I think leads to some interesting thoughts on the role played in societies by people who accumulate a lot of wealth (warning: TL;DR). Although I think a point of interest in the transition from cultural practices where the accumulator also acts as the redistributor to those where they do in fact horde wealth.

The simplest example is the almost undeniable fact that the average upper middle class American in 2019 would be in significantly worse shape had there not been 300 years of slavery all those years ago.

Notre Dame is part of the corporate identity of "France", "Christanity" or "Europe", whatever you want to call it. Therefore restoring and preserving it has a certain value. This value can be equal or bigger than giving away money for free to people who cannot harm you anyways. If the poor people in the 3rd World had nuclear weapons, this equation would certainly change.

Nevertheless I do not understand why rebuilding a wooden roof shall cost so much money. I am not an expert on the current price of wood, but somehow I have the feeling that some guys will become very rich in the process. What we can see here is a case of extreme virtue signalling that can and will be exploited.

+8 Culture per turn and +10 happiness, empire wide, is nothing to sneeze at, either.

God save the queen

No point replying to TS now but it was a strawman as I don't hate wealth at all.

But your point isn't so obvious. It's obviously true that they would be significantly relatively worse off but the waste of the future human wealth (for all) from the endeavors of slaves and their countries as free people could mean that in absolute terms they are less wealthy.

The current state is the result of everything that happened before including every injustice. We should be thankful that it didn't happen to us, but that's about it. We can't roll back time and it's wrong to do injustice to innocent people in order to restore the original state. Life is unfair, but not always to our disadvantage.

Thats a great thought.