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"It's anti-meritocratic?" Yes.

"How do you determine the threshold?" Somehow.

It doesn't matter how you determine it or what you end up determing nearly as much as doing it at all by any means, and working out good procedures and results over time.

Currently, we have nothing at all. A sub-optimal limit, a downright wrong limit, derived from sub-optimal, downright wrong methods is better than none at all.

The Bezoss and the Musks of the world are not doing anything we need done badly enough to be worth what we give them.

Those people who like to run big projects will still be full of themselves and still seek to be in charge of everyone else and will still command the same resources even in a world where that isn't expressed as personal private ownership of the resources.

If the change in incentives changes anything, if there are people who currently became billionairs and produced Amazon and Facebook, who would not have bothered if they couldn't own it all, I am prepared to call that only a win.

We'd still get anything that was actually valuable to us rather than just valuable to the owner.

The only problem is needing to incorporate enough ownership and capitalism so that there is any motivation for excellence. If everything is purely communist and no one owns anything, then all products and services suck. There does need to be some sort of reward for making the electric car and the charging network actually good, and some anti-reward for not making it available to everyone. Patents and copyright need to be somehow quite different. Maybe they still exist and confer some sort of benefit, but nothing like now. Rewarding people for inventing or improving things only to let them keep it for themselves, and even retain ownership control through drm and software over products that were sold more than nullifies the value of getting them to invent the thing in the first place. More than merely negates. Their existence suppresses everyone else who might have done it differently.

Where is the line and how do you determine it is no conundrum at all. It's nothing but some boring policy grunt work to hash that out.




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