Agreed that the government should reward hard work, but I'm always uncomfortable with the discussion around what is hard work.

Some poor people I know, they work harder than most of us desk monkeys, because they're doing back-breaking labor day after day. Holding down two, three jobs, shuffling around town on the bus to work 60, 80 hours a week for very little money.

This is not even an uncommon story. People working damn hard for not a lot of money.

Is that the hard work we want the government to reward? If not that, then what?

It's just too open-ended, and too easy to overlook a lot of people who work really hard, without really talking about it more.

Value creation is what we want to reward, I think.

This often is a euphemism for "making money is good". Except for the worst cases of rents (or scams), if you're making money, this means someone found what you do valuable, so hey, you're creating value. The tacit corollary is, if you're not making money, you're not creating much value (not logically correct obviously, but here it goes).

So one should define how you measure value, and what cost (social, externalities etc.) we should be ready to accept for each type of value.

So, what value is a hospice worker or a nurse creating to the world?

What value is a grade school teacher creating?

Hotel rooms need to be cleaned, and your coffee needs to be made. What value is that hotel room cleaner bringing into things? Or the dude framing drywall in your house?

To me, to be honest, "value creation" sounds more like "the stuff I like to think I'm doing" than a real thing.

This can be very hard to nail down though at the large scale. For instance Trump managed to secure the largest tax break in New York history in the 80s by convincing the government that his buildings for the Uber rich would be very valuable to the city.

That's a direct example where government power rewarded a crony.

Reward for value creation is something that the free market does every day in trillions of transactions.

It also tends to over-reward those who create value by having a strong negotiating position (usually due to coming to the table with lots of capital) and under-reward those who create value through labor. This is better than crony-ism, but it's not at all a panacea.

Over-reward? By what measure? If capital amplifies negotiating power then it means that capital is more important. One who can acquire capital to use in negotiation is using the most leverage to create value.

Labor's value is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.

By the measures of hard work and value creation being discussed in this thread. I'm sure you disagree. I'll try to save some time by stipulating that this is a value judgment, I likely disagree with your disagreement, and I am happy to agree to disagree.

But should you reward a hard working mediocre achiever the same as a not as hard working but gifted high achiever?

Then rewarding achievement is sort of pointless, giving help to those who need the least of it.

Maybe instead progress should be rewarded?

Government can certainly mitigate the effects of luck while simultaneously rewarding effort.

Examples?

A single-payer healthcare system is your government mitigating the effects of your bad luck. Giving you a tax break for gains on certain kinds of investments is your government rewarding your work. (That's not traditional "hard work" in the sense of expending physical energy, but deciding what investments to make is certainly work.)

Well, I guess if "simultaneous" means that different parts of the government with different programs can have opposite effects, okay.

But I'm talking about a program that mitigates the effects of luck while (in the same program, with the same methods) rewarding effort.

They're mostly opposite effects and there's no way to reliably distinguish hard work from luck. That's why there's so much debate on the subject.

When I said "simultaneous" I mean to apply it to a government, not a particular program.

In any case though, any government program that gives equal resources to everyone and isn't means-tested to hell can do both. For example, an UBI both mitigates luck (by giving everyone a set amount of resources) and rewards hard work (because better workers will get far better returns with the income they've been given).

Sure, UBI doesn't completely negate the value of work, but UBI decreases the value of hard work because everyone gets something without having to do any work.