[inigyou]

I have an interesting thought experiment too. First everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who strings razor wire across a road and starts charging 5c to unhook it while you pass by. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everyone does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody else. I ask the question: is this something that a good society would try to stop?

Which one is the better allegory of modern capitalism?

[hnav]

It's somewhere in the middle usually. Kid gets a bunch of people to pool their money to build a new road that is more convenient and lobby the road authority to not build competing roads. Then puts up razor wire and tries to extract the maximum that the market will tolerate.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Nozick's thought experiment isn't about modern capitalism, which can be and should be trivially condemned without the work of gedankenexperimenten.

It's about how a utopian society could and/or should respond to changes in resource distribution, and how entirely consensual behavior and exchanges between people can still lead to situations that are problematic.

[inigyou]

I think Nick's utopian egalitarian society would arrange for the amazing basketball player to have the job of playing amazing basketball, but the same income as everyone else. In exchange for playing basketball really well, he doesn't have to, say, clean toilets.

Making everyone have the same income means there is already a big infrastructure to manage how resources are allocated in this society - it already can't have been a free-trade system with currency that can be arbitrarily sent and received.