> INHO we should be looking much more at consumption and a lot less at income or (worst of all) assets.
At what age can you retire?
Can you afford education for yourself and your children? Can you afford the home in the district with the good schools? How much debt will you and your children be in after finishing college?
What are the odds you go bankrupt from a medical incident, even with "insurance"?
"Consumption" of cars, electronics, restaurant meals, etc. are not the really significant economic expenditures in a persons life. It's those big items that create debt slaves and crippling economic anxiety.
> Can you afford the home in the district with the good schools?
Let me pick on that one in particular. Let's suppose that we redistributed all the assets in the country evenly (never mind how). Doing so did not increase the number of homes in districts with good schools. So not everyone can have them, no matter how much money everyone has. Who's going to get those houses? Not everyone who has school-aged kids.
Or take college. Redistribute all the money, and it won't change the number of college classrooms. Who's going to get to go? Not everyone.
Same with beach houses. There are more people who want beach houses than there are beach houses. Redistribute all assets evenly, and it may change who has the beach houses, but it won't change the fact that more people want them than have them.
If everyone had the same amount of money, these things would still be allocated on the basis of who's willing to pay the most for them - that is, who's willing to give up the most other things in order to get that thing.
Remove money entirely, and these things will still be allocated somehow - by who gets luckiest in the lottery, or who has the best political connections, for example. There is no system that magically makes there be as many beach houses as there are people who want them. So there will always be the problem of how scarce resources are allocated.
> If everyone had the same amount of money, these things would still be allocated on the basis of who's willing to pay the most for them - that is, who's willing to give up the most other things in order to get that thing.
Though that's arguably a better situation from the equality perspective. Right now we have people who are allocated everything they want and others who are allocated none of what they need. Taking redistribution to a monomaniacal extreme is probably a bad idea for well understood reasons, but that doesn't mean that redistribution doesn't have its place.
At what age can you retire?
Can you afford education for yourself and your children? Can you afford the home in the district with the good schools? How much debt will you and your children be in after finishing college?
What are the odds you go bankrupt from a medical incident, even with "insurance"?
"Consumption" of cars, electronics, restaurant meals, etc. are not the really significant economic expenditures in a persons life. It's those big items that create debt slaves and crippling economic anxiety.