So by definition since it was accumulated before they were born they did none of these things except possibly the last. I don't want to run an economy based on which living people now dead rich people decided to hand their fortunes off to.
Why shouldn't it be their choice? If you earned money, shouldn't you have the right to choose who it goes to?
Wouldn't you want to give your wealth to your children? The fact is, most people do, and you'll never change that without imposing violent force. The fundamental unit is the family, not society.
Well of course not - my ideas should be judged solely based on how they would actually effect people's lives, which is the same system I judge the current system on. There's no reason to think that the way things are organized now is the best possible way, so why not try to improve?
There are lots of reasons to think the way things are organized is the best possible way. Western capitalist societies are the strongest countries in world history. People are richer and more free than anywhere else. Of course you can modify them to possibly gain some improvement but changing the entire system is highly questionable.
I'm actually having a fine time in this society, it's just that as someone who doesn't care solely about myself, I have concern for people not benefiting from the current order. People who are impoverished under the current system are not likely to have the resources or skills to build their own mini-society - again, if such a thing were remotely allowed. How do you think people would react if there was a mass exodus of the urban poor out to unused stretches of countryside to build new societies?
It doesn't take much resources or skills to "build a new society", and the resources are incredibly cheap. Remember that people have been doing this for thousands of years with much less resources.
Most people would see it as a win/win: poor people would be able to have a better life in this new system (according to you), and they would no longer be committing crimes and soaking up welfare in our society.
If it's moral, remember that we already live in a society where plenty of people don't have to work a day in their lives: people who inherit a lot of money.
They are able to not work because their parents did work. Their parents didn't spend all of their money, which means they had some left over to give to their children. It's pleasure deferred by their parents and given to their children. It's 100% fair.
By contrast, you're talking about people who have never contributed anything, and are only able to not work because money is extracted from people forcefully who did.
Do you think we should go to a 100% inheritance tax to make sure those rich kids have an incentive to work hard?
No, because their parents earned the right to allow their children to not work.
If this is the case, good news: it turns out the world is a better place than you realized, we can assure a better quality of life for people without having to collapse into whatever variety of chaos you're envisioning.
If you spent the money on giving them an education (we already do this), infrastructure (we already do this), and other things that actually improve their lives and make them useful then there would be an economic argument. But if you just give them money or even things that can be exchanged for money (food stamps) then it's very questionable whether this is a good idea.
Furthermore, you need to understand what actually makes an economy good. Just having people buy things is not what makes an economy good. People need to produce things. And they also need to create viable businesses. These things require certain levels of intelligence. There is a correlation between IQ and income. What you may be doing here is actually creating a dysgenic effect, where you are subsidizing the reproduction of the bottom part of the intelligence curve. This makes the economy and society worse. It means that there is more demand for goods without more production of goods, driving up prices. It means that there's more demand for jobs without more production of jobs, driving down wages.
Well suffering is (usually) not caused directly by those people, but it is absolutely caused by the fact that they have wealth and resources while others do not.
But the economy isn't a zero sum game. One person earning resources doesn't take those resources away from another person.
This is a fundamental economic principle which you do not seem to understand.
but there's no sense in which even those rich people who are very productive are 'creating' their wealth.
Yes there is. That's how trade works. If I have an orange and want an apple, and you have an apple but want an orange, then if we trade, we have both profited. Both of us are better off, wealth in our 2-person society has been created.
Now look at the trades that wealthy people engage in. They trade dollars for capital. What are the effects? The companies producing capital (buildings, equipment, etc.) earn a profit. The wealthy person gains the capital which may earn him money. Wealth for society has been created. If the business fails, then it's the rich person who loses. The next step is that workers, who couldn't possibly have afforded to buy the capital, can still benefit from it by trading with the rich person. The trade is that the rich person gets the profit, and they get the wage. Without the capital, they would not be able to gain nearly the wage they earn. Both sides profit, wealth is created.
If both sides were not profiting, then people would not trade in the first place.
Well yeah, standards are increasing all the time: progress!
Yes but you use the language of "survival" as an appeal to your philosophy when what you really mean is comfort, which is a much less persuasive word.
Capitalism was a solid step up from feudalism in most ways, but that doesn't mean it's the last economic system we'll ever have. As society gets richer and there are more resources to go around, people continue to deserve their fair share of those resources.
Yes, their fair share: what they are entitled to by voluntary exchange with another person. Not what they are "entitled" to simply by existing.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that I think a commune is the perfect economic system.
Because it's a small scale version of a communist system.
A tiny society is never going to be as productive as a giant one, no matter how much better it's economic system is.
That doesn't matter. What matters is per-capita production.
This is why the option to leave society and go build your own is not a good one: no matter how much better your system is, you just can't compete on scale.
Again it doesn't matter. Per-capita is all that matters to any individual person.
So I describe a society where people don't have to work at all, and you envision a gulag?
Yes because work always needs to be done. For any person to not work, someone else needs to work to support them. When that transfer of wealth is involuntary, that is essentially slavery.
You're a very unpleasant person. I think this will be my last over-long response to your nonsense.
I'm unpleasant for pointing out the truth of what you're saying? You don't want to work. You want other people to work so that you don't have to do anything. You think that you have constructed this brilliant philosophy to support this notion but it's all nonsense that no working person will ever agree to.