[ben_w]

> In your simplification, you have removed everything that isn’t labor (i.e. demand for commodities)

Incorrect, I'm definitely including demand in there.

I'm saying there's no supply.

It's n/0, not 0/0.

> Instead, you should have invested in a farm and some robots. Sorry, there’s no free lunch if you can’t steal it from younger generations.

(1) OK, but that's not what you were saying before

(2) (a) The AI to control those robots does not yet exist, (b) when that AI does exist, we can set the pension age to zero — doing so is called "UBI", and AI is often suggested as both a mechanism to enable it and as an economic transition requiring it.

> Edit: you’ve revised history and now added a bit about “similar arguments” and inflation.

It was intended for clarification, not to "revise history"; FWIW, the para in which you wrote this edit was not present when I clicked "reply".

> This is fine and normal and would be preferable to the present system and is not dependent on future labor in the same way as direct redistribution.

You asked "Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor." — I believe I have demonstrated that it is.

[dsheets]

You have demonstrated only that the thought experiment is dependent on the future market for a commodity and not on some future labor being exploited. Value in the future is dependent on demand and not on extraction from labor.

[ben_w]

I demonstrated: without labour there is no value to be exchanged.

I did this by showing that your own suggested commodity asymptotically approaches buying zero of the available zero goods, services, and assets as the production of those also becomes zero.

You can buy all of the nothing being made.

[dsheets]

Yes, a nonzero quantity of labor is necessary to avoid a pathological economy? This is not debated.

The question is how the future value is priced. The original assertion was that future value must come from labor and there is no difference between direct redistribution and private transactions (of which only rent extraction was given as an example). My counter is that there are alternatives that are neither taxation nor rent-seeking. In particular, the holding of assets to be later sold is a store of value that notably does not depend on future labor any more than any functioning economy depends on labor as an input.

We have pretty robust systems for deciding what (most) things are worth via supply and demand. Claiming that future value must be extracted from future labor is just false — a system with some backpressure on the payouts to retirees is much more sustainable than one without backpressure. In your simplified thought experiment, you must agree that there is no dependence on future labor as none exists! The pension is also not effective, of course, but that is to be expected — essentially no pension is effective when stranded on a desert island.

(To be clear, I don’t advocate storing gold by birth year as a practical way to run a pension scheme.)