Perhaps others can offer additional examples of peaceful redistributions, but the only ones that come to my mind are the Jubilee amongst the ancient Israelites and the potlatch type ceremonies among "native" cultures studied by late 19th and early 20th century anthropologists. Neither the French, the Russian nor the Chinese Revolutions exactly qualify as peaceful.
Indeed, the current crisis is arguably the result of the US elites being too successful in transferring wealth from the rest of the population to themselves. The means by which they have done so, bubbles and financialization, is collapsing of its own weight and all current efforts are directed to stopping that collapse without sacrificing their own wealth. So they are supporting creation of debt that will be a general obligation of the taxpayers, expecting that, as usual, they will be able to avoid those taxes. Unfortunately, this increasingly fails the smell test and thus does not inspire the necessary faith and confidence to do the trick.
The party of the elites could regress even further in their economic theory, resurrect and revivify Malthus and then proclaim that the unemployed, like the Irish during the hunger, cannot be saved and the kindest thing to do is to let them starve. However, they may not be left with enough of a society and economy to support a military that could protect their wealth. Most unfortunate. Oh, what to do?
They need to be saved from themselves.
As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Progress is ALL about ensuring that power does not get - and stay - too concentrated. Today, we see when power via money gets too concentrated: we get a massive crisis. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
