[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

Wealthy people control resources. You can take control from them, but it will not create more resources. One, fundamental resource is human labor. This resource will decline in proportion to the total human population whether it will be controlled by wealthy people or not.

Someone will need to physically do the work that needs to be done around old people. And there will be more old people, than there will be young people.

Your example is less extreme, but it is still about redistributing control. Redistributing dollars redistributes control of what people do, and how other resources are allocated.

This is related to the article, because moving control of people does not create more people. As population will be getting older, there will be more old people that less young people will need to take care of. This is a fact.

You could argue that redistributing wealth will lead to more efficient control of resources, and so it will make it easier to provide care. But it is still fundamentally about control of diminishing resources and increasing needs.

BTW - I'm Polish and my government tries to literally pay people for having children. Around 30 000$ spread across childhood (take into account that Poles earn a lot less than Americans), and while it put a small dent in fertility rate, the number of children born in Poland is currently lower than before introducing that program.

Yes, it turns out that resources are actually the thing we need to sustain older people.

> Someone will need to physically do the work that needs to be done around old people.

Someone literally is already doing the work that needs to be done for old people. It's just that most of the wealth produced from that work goes to already wealthy people.

Exactly that work (social support, and healthcare for seniors) in total numbers consumes resources, not produces them. If it wouldn't be so there would be no need to fund it from taxes.

Frankly, it sounds like you rushed with a randomly chosen slogan to this thead.

Also we do not require people to pull startup hours, and only a minority of the population ever does that. I dont see how that comes into this conversation.

"The wealthy kind of are an endless source of loot because the definition of wealthy is one relative to a median, so you'll either end up with everyone roughly equal in wealth (is that a bad thing?) "

In the world advocated for in that comment, with aggressively averaged out income/wealth, there is no incentive to produce value above what is required to reach the average income.

Now, the metric for "everybody is better off" is still an open problem, but there seem to be near pareto optimal steps we can take, like a high threshold wealth tax.

I'm sure that gimmick-y things to avoid wealth redistribution can be legislated on as they have been in the past.

One owner of a yacht was on the board of his alma mater. The school was required by law to spend equally on women's sports as men't sports. The school had to invest in sports fields which were expensive. He complained about it. Later I worked on a yacht of a person who grew grass. During this time when the schools were required to increase the size of their fields he made a fortune. There are just winners and losers.

But cooking for 40 or 4 are pretty much the same from a labor perspective at that size because recipes scale to 10x easily.

True. But that's how they've been treating folks with less advantage since time immemorial. Which tends to work until the exploitation becomes too egregious and lower classes implement a head tax on the wealthy.