> From a democratic perspective the doctor can in theory earn much more as long as that doesn't grant them more influence or rights. Someone having a sports car isn't in isolation a democratic problem. Access to education, communities and security is.
I think this is a misunderstanding of why people want money. Because none of that stuff is boolean. You don't have education or not. Harvard and community college are both "education" but they're not the same.
Even when people buy a sports car, it's not because they derive $60,000 worth of benefit from fast acceleration, it's primarily a method of status signaling. Which in turn creates social opportunities in everything from business networking to romance.
You can create a minimum floor for everyone (NB: a UBI is an outstanding way to do this across all domains), but "money buys stuff" applies to pretty much anything, including incremental amounts of education, community and security.
> One can of course question whether most authoritarians care much about their own ideology. But as an ideology they do care that the system is fair, just not society overall. People do believe that it is fair to have a "strong leader".
This is fundamentally impossible. There is conflict in politics not only because of misunderstandings but also because different people have different interests. The "strong leader" will have to make choices that benefit some people over others. If all you're doing is redefining fairness to mean whatever the leader decides it is then you're not creating a fair society, you're just creating a society and defining fairness as whatever subsequently happens.
In some sense that is also what we do with the output of the democratic process, but that only has a claim to fairness as a result of the fairness in the inputs (one person one vote). With authoritarianism the selection process can make no such claim, not least because the existing "strong leader" would by definition have enough de facto control to stay in power indefinitely and then anoint a successor at the end.
I think this is a misunderstanding of why people want money. Because none of that stuff is boolean. You don't have education or not. Harvard and community college are both "education" but they're not the same.
Even when people buy a sports car, it's not because they derive $60,000 worth of benefit from fast acceleration, it's primarily a method of status signaling. Which in turn creates social opportunities in everything from business networking to romance.
You can create a minimum floor for everyone (NB: a UBI is an outstanding way to do this across all domains), but "money buys stuff" applies to pretty much anything, including incremental amounts of education, community and security.
> One can of course question whether most authoritarians care much about their own ideology. But as an ideology they do care that the system is fair, just not society overall. People do believe that it is fair to have a "strong leader".
This is fundamentally impossible. There is conflict in politics not only because of misunderstandings but also because different people have different interests. The "strong leader" will have to make choices that benefit some people over others. If all you're doing is redefining fairness to mean whatever the leader decides it is then you're not creating a fair society, you're just creating a society and defining fairness as whatever subsequently happens.
In some sense that is also what we do with the output of the democratic process, but that only has a claim to fairness as a result of the fairness in the inputs (one person one vote). With authoritarianism the selection process can make no such claim, not least because the existing "strong leader" would by definition have enough de facto control to stay in power indefinitely and then anoint a successor at the end.