[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.)