> 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.