bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 33,991
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
There are other possibilities.Money is memory of favors not yet returned. To say it's bad for one person's wealth to exceed some amount is either to say it's bad for one person to do that much more for others than they have done for him, or else it's to say it's bad for people to remember the services others have done them and return the favors when they can. Both of those are moral insanity, on a level with saying it's wrong to write Harry Potter stories.
One is that simple money fails to account for any asymmetry that might exist between the value to the buyers of goods or services, and the value to the seller of those goods.
Wealth is ultimately a measure of what the world owes each person. But pretty much every economic system ever, holds that what a person earns doesn't exactly match with what they are owed. The difference being 'taxes' and/or 'benefits'.
There's no fundamental or inalienable right to keep every last red cent of your earnings. The rules about how much you get to keep are fairly arbitrary, but the idea that the answer should, or must, be 'all of it' is clearly rubbish.
To suggest that there's a limit to how much one person can possibly have done to help out his society, and therefore to the amount society should be beholden to him, isn't unreasonable at all, once you accept that money isn't significantly different from social credit points, or a videogame score. There are rules, and what those rules are is to be determined by the people in charge of society. There are no wrong answers. Just poor choices about who should be allowed to make the rules.
IMO, letting people who think that their preferred rules are somehow a law of nature make the rules is a poor choice.