Re: What?

No, people may perform their required share of the useful work in a developed post-industrial society, and have complete social access to the wealth collectively provided by all.

And that's not voluntary exchange... how?

because in a capitalist system, "success" is usually quantified exclusively on the basis of how much money one acquires, and this often occurs via trust funds, capital gains, and happening to be born with a specific talent at the right time for that particular talent to be financially lucrative when that person reaches adulthood, and has nothing to do necessarily with usefulness to society per se,

You are mixing several, premises and arguments here.

1) That a lot of richness is not created through production, I agree with you, and there are clear solutions for that too without doing away with wealth creation or with private property and free markets.

2) You yourself hint at the problem with the latter part "the fact that far larger numbers of people work hard at least equally hard and long" - it is inevitable that the larger numbers of people doing the same thing make each one cheaper to hire. This is partly due to specialization, but much more due to sheer numbers. The only way they can be better paid is if there was fewer of them.

3) You still seem to think that most rich people are rich through inheritance or capital gains. Ironically enough, this may be true of the second 1% (or maybe second 0.5%), but is generally speaking not true of the first 1% (or first 0.5%). Forbes gives us, for the USA:

Gates (entrepreneur)
Buffett (entrepreneur + finance)
Ellison (entrepreneur)
C. Koch (entrepreneur)
D. Koch (entrepreneur)
C. Walton (inheritance + entrepreneur)
Soros (finance)
Adelson (entrepreneur)
J. Walton (inheritance + entrepreneur)
A. Walton (inheritance + entrepreneur)

This is just the top ten, but it matters precisely because it is the top ten. Only two are more capital based than production based; only one is heavily capital based. Only the Waltons are products of inheritance. (Yes, Buffett and the Koch brothers were not born poor, but what they inherited is nothing like what they have now). So no, the really richest people are rich through enterprise, at least more often than they are through inheritance or capital gains.

And this is in the USA, which have over 100 years of very rich people behind. In emerging countries, the entrepreneur bias is much stronger, even in spite of greater governmental collusion or corruption.

It is the second 1% who are rich through capital gains and inheritance, and this includes many old rich, but few active entrepreneurs. They tend not to be the richest, because of four effects: one, capital gains raise very fast but also fall very fast, and it is not an exact science when to quit, as Soros can tell you; two, they tend not to be good entrepreneurs and tend not to know how to take risks - that means they never grow like the list above; associated with it, if they realize this, they put their money in safer assets, risking less but also increasing less, stabilizing but not raising their relative position; fourth and final, inheritance based wealth divides up every generation among all surviving children (and often ex wives), which makes the pie smaller and smaller every time someone dies.

Then there is a third 1% made up of specialized professionals: lawyers, doctors, consultants, accountants, university professors. Neither of whom really works hard in your definition of the term, but whose specialization makes them so few that they are expensive. (Of course, entry barriers don't help - there is no reason why people who are not accepted by the trade guilds of each of these, cannot practice them) However it is still a stretch to consider them entirely unproductive in the way Soros is.

4) You still don't deny that the only way to prevent this degree of inequality is, directly, to take wealth from the rich.

or working on a farm to help seed crops

?

When was the last time you were in a farm, Dissident? 1860?

You use machines for that these days.

Yet people like Vanna White make huge amounts of money compared to the average person who work in useful jobs

Again, quantity. Because it's many people doing these jobs, they are cheaper.

In a system that was resource-based rather than money-based, there would be no purpose whatsoever for the entire banking and insurance company industries,

And what makes you think I am a friend of either of these industries? They can rot in hell for what I am concerned. Bankers are inflationists and charlatans; insurers stimulate irresponsibility and lack of foresight.

Yet if it has less power to regulate the economy, then the rich not only become even more powerful without the need of the state to be purchased in order to make that happen (because they essentially come to rule society without any self-imposed restraint)

I've never seen any sense in this argument. Every regulation helps some of the rich and connected. I don't even mean it as a theoretical; I mean it in the real world: every regulation on the economy is entrenching somebody's position while harming the competition, the consumers, the workers or a combination of all. So, every regulation repealed will benefit the whole against the particular interests. Go ahead, throw a regulation at me, and I will find who it's working for, to the detriment of everyone else.

they also run the risk of collapsing under their own excesses

Let them collapse. The wages of sin is death.

Which one expects [â¦]

Read again your own paragraph. Who is doing that?
It's government.

The USA funds Israel to a great extent

The USA fund Israel but do not control it. Israel has a clearly independent foreign policy. And because they do not control it, the USA do not grant it any security guarantees, either. Israel has had to fight all its seven wars alone.

Ironically enough, while American politicians would like to grant Israel security guarantees "to show America means to stand by its friend blah blah blah" Israelis are not interested because they know it would mean to relinquish their independence to take security decisions of their own.

Like it has meant to the Western European and East Asian allies.

Obviously, these governments do not like this subservient and beholden position, but they feel they have no other choice considering the power they would go up against, and the expenses they would incur, if they attempted to bolster their military so they could be a challenge to the USA in the way China and Russia are.

France effectively asserted an independent security policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War. Turkey has started to during the Islamist government. Neither has faced any backlash. Right, both are big countries. But the point is that they found out that they needed that independence to pursue their own interests when they were not convergent with American interests. Neither has faced any backlash. Why would they? The USA know they are not about to become another USSR.

that Japan did when it made its own bid

Long story short: Americans were more racist back then than now; FDR wanted a war to stimulate the economy; and you can't really argue against Pearl Harbor. Just too many things went wrong together for the Japanese. Also, it's questionable that they foresaw the reaction to the German invasion of Poland anymore than the Germans did. They probably would have thought twice if they had known it.

None of this applies to India. To China... maybe if it tried something stupid in Taiwan or the South China Sea, or if North Korea collapsed, but short of that, not so either.

Bottom line

I always suspected you liked thongs.

this is what happens when such a wealthy nation puts profits before people and even cost-efficiency when it comes to the health care industry, which is usually the one industry that prosperous nations believe shouldn't be required to make profits but allocated mostly on the basis of simple human need.

Not a nation. A cartel of some doctor unions, big hospitals, insurers and pharma labs, colluded with their allies in Congress.

Well, can't you at least agree she has very cute facial features?

That's a very Dissident way of saying "she is pretty," but she is pretty!

I was listening to the instrumental "Summer Place" from the City of Prague Philharmonic, and I now find myself identifying that tune with you

Now I need to listen to something for you too, LOL.