> Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues.

Massive concentration of wealth has a few outcomes you may find disagreeable or sub-optimal

* Huge concentration of power in smaller numbers of people, chosen for unrelated skills, heavily tied to luck

* People with huge amounts of power being able to make extremely sub-optimal decisions and still be entirely fine. Elon can buy and run a business into the ground on a whim and be entirely fine.

* Concentration of direction of human labour - it is more worthwhile to spend many lifetimes of humans to very slightly increase the comfort of one multi-billionaire.

For the last example, Americans earn more typically than anyone else in the world and data is easy to find. Assume lifetime earnings of $3M. Bezos' yacht cost more than enough for 100 full lifetimes of US median worker labour, and requires ten lifetimes every year to maintain.

For one ship, for one person.

You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.

> Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome

Well it being a daft choice is rather the point, taking the absolute extremes is rarely a sensible approach. Total abolition of private wealth is not the point anyone is making. The argument people are making is to take money from those that have so much that the impact to their lives would be negligible, and use it to improve the lives of many others. It may even make them wealthier!

You said optimum there, but optimal for what? Even if it's just efficient allocation of capital, doesn't that rely on pressure to invest well? The reward for doing so is more wealth, but what if you don't need more, or don't need to constantly try and get more?

The wealthiest could sit with vast sums as cash and be fine, which is sensible for them but surely a terrible use of capital.

> the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away.

That's a government.

> Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated,

Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?

> She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids.

How do you figure that? And you can simply swap over fully educating those kids for something else if you want, unless the argument is that Taylor Swift specifically is better at allocating resources for whatever outcomes the population wants.

Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy?

Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring?

In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?

edit -

To be clear, I think the market is an incredible way of constructing a ludicrously large graph of how to use the worlds resources and human labour, tied to what people want as an outcome, allowing fractional voting through the network in a way that's extremely simple for end users (I buy things for prices I'm happy with, the "market" of millions of other people optimise the back end of that) and is self-optimising.

The problem comes when some people have enormously more votes than others, distorting it all, or are able to manipulate the graph, or where hill climbing optimisation cannot reach the more optimal states (infrastructure classically, legal systems are another good example).