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CCC comments on The Bedrock of Fairness - Less Wrong
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It's a lot of resources from the perspective of a single person, but I was thinking at a slightly larger scale. By "easy", I mean that manageable groups of people can do it repeatedly and be confident of success. Really, the fact that sentient minds can be valued in terms of resources at all is sufficient for my argument. (That value can then be ignored when assessing productivity, as it's a sunk cost.)
You seem to be looking in the wrong place with your "that people ought to earn every resource themselves" example - my opinion is that the people who have resources should not give those resources to people who won't make good use of them. That the people who lack resources will then have to earn them if they're to survive is an unavoidable consequence of that (and is my real goal here), but those aren't the people that I think ought to be changing things.
As for what strategies people actually follow, I think most people do what I'm saying they should do, on an individual level. Most people protect their resources, and share them only with those who they expect to be able to return the favor. On the group level, though, people lose track of how much things actually cost, and support things like welfare that help people regardless of whether they're worth the cost of keeping alive.
When widely applied, this principle tends to lead to trouble. It's a very small intuitive step from this to "people who aren't making good use of their own resources should have them taken away and given to someone who will make better use of them" and that is, in turn, a very small step away from "resources shouldn't be wasted on anyone too elderly to be employed".
Now, I'm not saying that's where you're going with this. It's just that that's close enough to what you said that it's probably something you'd want to specifically avoid.
That step doesn't look small to me, specifically because it leaps over the rather large concept of property.
We pretty much do this already (outside of a few nations like New Zealand), and it doesn't lead to trouble at all, although some people complain about it (although if they recognized exactly what was going on, the number of people complaining about it would probably rise dramatically).
Property taxes rise with land values, which are proportional to the value of resources. If you're not making good use of your resources, you can't cover property taxes, and you have to sell the property. The only people who will buy it are those who think they can make sufficient use of the resources to cover the sale price, in addition to property taxes going forward.
Not quite. Imposing some cost to own certain things is not the same as "should have them taken away".
Yes, I understand that you can construct a continuous spectrum from a small fee to "it's cheaper for you to give it away rather than pay the tax", but I feel that in practice the distance is great.