[Schroedingersat]

>The garbage man doesn't show up unless he's paid. Farmers don't grow enough food for others unless they're paid.

>To first approximation, no one provides any essential service for free.

That's pay.

Profit is proportional to capital, not effort (even if it requires effort to materialise). Wage or earnings don't prodce the same pathological effects as profit, even if one person earns $500/hr and another earns $5/hr, the inequity and power imbalance is a constant and relatively quite small compared to exponential inequity entailed by making earnings proportional to wealth.

The assertion that a factory, or a 1000 hectare farm, or a house that you don't live in can be owned is a positive statement, not a brute fact of the world, or a necessary consequency of commerce and trade. As soon as you maoe that statement you are saying that owning these things entitles the owner or shareholder to an exponentially increasing share of control over the world and other people while your farmer and garbage man slowly go bankrupt.

[anamax]

"exponentially increasing share of control"? "Exponential" has a meaning and the situation you're describing isn't consistent with it.

If there's an exponential at work here, it has a vanishingly small exponent.

People who don't get paid for access to their capital don't make said capital available to others.

Note that all capital starts as "I made x but I'm going to spend less."

[Schroedingersat]

d/dt(wealth) = a * wealth - constant

This is the definition of an exponential and the definition of profit. If under your system you can profit in terms of proportion of a real, finite commodity which is essential for life (ie. control more land in proportion to how much land you control on average with a known strategy available to anyone) then your system definitionally has runaway wealth inequality and will necessarily end in violent collapse or totalitarianism.

The inclusion of the constant prevents entry to the system by people with less than a threshold level of wealth and skews the benefits towards wealth levels where the constant is small. The result also holds as long as the term on the right is polynomial or larger.