Define "against the rest of us". The whole point of earning "extra" money is to be able to lay claim to scarce resources. Inevitably, outbidding someone for something will be felt as using the extra earned money against them. If you cannot outbid someone, then the extra money is worth nothing, and hence there is no reason to work more than average.

If you take my comment as a basic premise of a fair economy, then "outbidding" does not make any sense. In fact, it makes more sense to share scarce resources.

There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

> non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on

if they are non-scarce, then you already have obtained your required amount, and thus no longer demand more.

> buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

buying up assets, since assets would be scarce, allows you to demand payment for their use, and thus, ensure your future financial situation is secure.

It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people. And it gives those who don't own assets the motivation to work harder. The resulting society will then have more aggregate wealth than before.

> It sucks for those who don't own assets, but this system resolves the conflict of how to assign assets amongst people.

It sounds like we can assign bandwidth to the highest bidder then. Who needs Net Neutrality?

Seriously, the problem with your thinking is that you're stuck with the idea that our current economy is the only and most fair way to divide resources.

The current economy already has marginal income/wealth taxes to divide resources in a more “fair” way. Obviously they can and should be tweaked as changing parameters call for it to be tweaked in order to achieve whatever goals society is working for (such as a floor on standard of living).

This is true, but one problem is that in our current system fairness is always secondary. Something we tweak for when things go askew. A more ideal economy would flip this around, to ensure we don't allow some people to spoil it for others. And certainly not a minority spoiling it for the majority, as is the case all too often. The law simply can't keep up with the evil business schemes cooked up by a rich and greedy minority.

No, the scarcest resource is human time. If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources. Him doing that trade doesn't reduce the number of human work hours available to others, instead he increased the value of the pool since now there is more diversity of jobs the pool is capable of performing.

Your assumption here is that you can trade human work hours for finite natural resources on some market, and that everyone has to pay for those resources on the market. There is nor reason why you should be able to do that, rather the natural system is to allocate all finite resources equally to each person and then you an pay for those with your work, but you working harder to pay a person to share his resources with you wouldn't affect anyone else in the economy unless they too wants to have extra of that resource.

> If person A works for 1 hour then he added 1 hour of human work time to the pool of resources. Therefore it makes sense that he can now extract 1 extra hour of human work time from the pool of resources.

What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor? What if more people want 1 hour of a certain type of labor that exceeds the supply of that certain type of labor?

> What if no one wants that 1 hour of labor?

Doesn't have to be hours, the hour was just to represent that it is a human working and not a finite resource. Different human work can be valued differently.

That wasn't at all clear (and you seemed to me to be suggesting exactly the opposite) in your comment upthread.

That motivation to work harder breaks down the moment it becomes common belief that the amount of additional hard work required to secure such assets is unrealistic for the average person.

> An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

The fact that it is expensive is what defines it as scare (i.e. lots of demand relative to little supply).

How about using a less fuel efficient vehicle? Is that “against others” as it uses up the non polluted portion of the environment?

> An example of what you can't do: buying up land so that everybody else has to pay higher prices for housing.

Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the world’s desirable land?

> Land is not the same everywhere. Low humidity, Mediterranean climate, coast California views are extremely scarce and in high demand. How are you going to fit 8B people onto the worlds desirable land?

If you want better than median living conditions then you work for it. There is no reason why it should be free to live in the best parts of the world if not everyone can, otherwise the privilege of living there would be a source of injustice.

Who decides what is median living conditions and how is that decided?

The conditions that are left when those above median have chosen theirs. If you want better you work for it. If you don't want better then you share the work those who worked for theirs produced. So you work just as much as you want, and others working more means those who don't have more.

It is true that if you want a luxury resource, like a very attractive location to live in, then others working more for that position means you also would have to work harder if you want to have it. But I don't consider people competing for luxury resources a problem, no that is a feature and is what makes the economy tick. If you don't want that rat race you have to live in median conditions.

>There are still many non-scarce things you can spend your extra money on.

>An example of what you can do: buying expensive cars.

Why are expensive cars not scarce? They're ultimately built using scarce resources (eg. steel, rubber, plastic, labor).

Expensive cars are just as much a scarce resource as everything else is.

What would reward be useful for if not to trade it for scarce goods? Literally there are only so many miles of coastline, so many front-row tickets to the Super Bowl, so many square feet of land within a 5 minute walk of any given place on Earth, etc.

At some point, that reward is going to be traded for something else that's in demand and where the demand exceeds the supply. If you interpret that as "use their extra earned money against the rest of us", then it seems that you are going to have to disallow the notion of rewarding those who decide to work more than average.

Although it's working an unhealthy amount and it pulls everyone else to do the same, perhaps not ?

/deleted

> But who influences regulation and legislation?

The voters do. People vote for corrupt politicians since they care about other things. They would do that even if you didn't have capitalism. The problem is therefore the implementation of your democracy and not capitalism. Removing capitalism while keeping the flawed democracy would just result in another Soviet scenario or even worse.

So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy. A corrupt democracy will try to do whatever it can to enrich its politicians, like taking bribes from companies etc. A healthy democracy doesn't take those bribes. You can find many countries where politicians works mostly for the people and not for companies, that is how it should be.

> So the problem isn't capitalism, it is corrupt democracy.

Keep going down the rabbit hole and the problem is corrupt humans. Transparency to enable everyone to keep everyone else in check is the only solution I can see.

Scandinavian countries have quite a lot of transparency and it works fairly well. I agree that humans are pretty corrupt but it can be mitigated in a lot of ways. I live in Scandinavia and yes, our politicians are corrupt as well but the systems and how people vote incentivise them to do the right thing most of the time.