Yes, it makes perfect sense. Don't address any of the counterpoints I raised, ignore the implementation details, and just keep repeating that. It sounds like a really great idea.
Artificially creating fairness by eliminating success has no downsides, especially in a competitive anarchic global system. It's gonna feel so good to not have those evil entrepreneurs trying to create too much value in the world to enrich their families. Fairness should be the ultimate end goal for everything, not overall prosperity. Because nature is 100% fair, this totally aligns with reality.
Bad analogy. Money is representative of externalities, of things exchanged by others, like the time they spent working to earn the income, or selling something, and it extends through many levels of transactions in society.
That’s nothing like someone’s good looks, which, by the way, is subjective and has changed over the ages.
Using this logic, having good genes represents an even greater injustice.
As you have said, money is a fuzzy representation of at least some value created via societal transactions.
Genetics, on the other hand, are wholly undeserved, even by the people passing them on. If we aim to champion fairness, I don't see how this cannot be part of the conversation.
Do you actually expect serious responses to your hyperbolically emotional and sarcastic posts? Well, here goes…
The only implementation detail I would change is the flat rate of $20 million. I would peg it to something like GDP per capita or average CoL multiplied by some number of years.
People have come from nothing and gone on to do amazing things. If you can’t get some kind of profit generating company off the ground or at least passive income through wise investing with that kind of windfall, then you quite frankly deserve to work in the proverbial widget factory with the unwashed masses. To wine about that betrays the lack of grit that probably lost you the nest egg on the first place.
The best entrepreneurs are the ones that are interested in learning and building amazing things. The ones in it to hoard wealth saddle the world with bullshit because it’s a bullshit incentive that requires bullshit mechanisms to protect their income stream. Think patent trolls.
If you want to see what fair looks like in nature, look at what every other animal beside humans get when they start life: the risk that around every corner lies a disease, predator, competitor, starvation, grave injury… What presumably sets humans apart and allowed us to thrive is cooperation on larger and larger scales throughout our evolution. Hoarding wealth is antithetical to the very thing that is supposed to make us an exceptional species.
There's a deep irony in both acknowledging that humans thrive on cooperation and building on the work of those that came before us, and yet also wanting to forcibly disrupt that process and centrally re-distribute wealth to less efficient but "fair" means every time someone dies.
"Hoarding wealth" is the entire reason we have capital to invest in new ideas and innovations.
Fairness sounds great of course! Who doesn't like fairness? The problem is, true fairness is neither achievable nor desirable, given the realities of human nature.
When you aim to force it onto the world via centralized authority, it generally results in worse outcomes since it can only be enforced punitively via the stick (instead of the carrot) -- creating even less fair power structures than the ones you aim to disrupt.
The point of my sarcastic posts is to illustrate this fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and how the world actually works. Again, we've tried this a million times, with the receipts to show for the results. It's not good.
Artificially creating fairness by eliminating success has no downsides, especially in a competitive anarchic global system. It's gonna feel so good to not have those evil entrepreneurs trying to create too much value in the world to enrich their families. Fairness should be the ultimate end goal for everything, not overall prosperity. Because nature is 100% fair, this totally aligns with reality.
History has shown these systems work every time.