Are all of your coworkers equally productive? Neighbors? Relatives?

The answer for all 3 for me personally is no. I have family members who make decisions based on different priorities which change their income. My coworkers differ radically in their abilities and work ethic. How can they have equal incomes in this scenario? There is a way to do this, and it hasn't worked any time it's been tried.

I don't think "fixing income inequality" needs to mean that everyone is paid the same amount. It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee, and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth. Even if you did think that they were that meritorious, you could still make an argument that "fairness" should involve balancing both merit and utility (in this case referring to the diminishing marginal utility of money).

> It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee

If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company, and the CEO executes a few big multi-million dollar deals that month, then the CEO in fact would be significantly more productive (in terms of capital to the company) than the average employee.

> and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth.

Yes like taking the risk of starting such a business to employ others and putting down the capital which might be lost.

I also don't know who you think would enforce some kind of "fairness" limit on how much money someone makes. The government doing so would likely be ruled unconstitutional and wouldn't likely ever be passed in the first place through congress.

Just to play devil's advocate, if you put a normal Walmart employee in a CEO position, or maybe just an "executive" position with decision-making authority, how far off would they be in terms of productivity from someone normally in that position? Say the employee was 1/10th as productive as that executive, that would still be thousands of times more productive than that same employee at their regular minimum wage job.

> If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company

If all the normal employees quit and Walmart can't replace them, how much money does Walmart lose?

Perhaps we should calculate value to the company based on that sort of reasoning.

I mean, "universal basic income" would be a good start.

Until everyone's cost of living goes up because they have an extra $1k/mo and landlords / retailers know it. The same thing happened with guaranteed student loans. When people have money to burn the market will react by increasing prices.

It might, but it turns out macroeconomics isn't that simple.

Adding one thousand to most statistical measures will either not change it or shift it by one thousand.

In a given time period, let's say a year, you may personally work harder or smarter than in some other year. Do you believe that you should be compensated the same regardless of how hard or smart you work in a given year?

If you're a self-employed craftworker who produces hammers, should your income be the same each year, without regard for the quality or quantity of hammers you produced that year, and without considering the world's need for the sorts of hammers you produced? How would you go about achieving that outcome?

I don't think fixing incoming equality means zeroing out differences in income. It means shortening the gap between the bottom quartile and the top quartile, which is currently huge.