Hm. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. Please elaborate, if you will?
Gladly. (EDITED: I originally used 'wealth' and 'power' instead of 'wealth' and 'coercion'. It was rightly pointed out that 'wealth' is just a form of 'power'. So rather than "separating wealth from power", what I'm really talking about is "separating our ideas about wealth from our ideas about coercion".)
On one axis, we have poverty/wealth, which is a measure of "how much stuff do I have?" - how much food, water, air, shelter, etc. - up to and including how much control I have over my physical environment. Near one end of the spectrum, we can imagine skeletal children waiting for vultures to eat them. Near the other end of the spectrum, we can imagine eloi living within utility fogs, waiting to condense anything they dream of out of thin air.
On another axis, we have the social ladder / status games that humans play so well. Near one end of that spectrum, we can imagine abject slaves, whose right to live is up to the whim of others; near the other end of that spectrum, we can imagine despotic conquerors, whose whim controls the lives of millions.
The poverty/wealth spectrum is NOT zero-sum, because even if we collapse a society's span on that spectrum down to a single point, WHERE that point falls matters - everyone being equally poor is materially different from everyone being equally rich.
On the other hand, the social coercion spectrum is fundamentally zero-sum - you can't remove B's inferiority to A, without removing A's superiority to B.
The problem is, most people don't seem to REALLY separate those two spectra - when we talk about "making people more equal", we usually talk about wealth redistribution, not coercion redistribution. Paul Graham discusses this at length.
The thing is, coercion influences wealth, and vice-versa. But the fact that they influence each other doesn't make them the same thing - it just means that the phase diagram covers a subset of the phase space, instead of the whole thing.
One thing you notice when you look at history, is how various technologies (which are physical objects, and therefore on the wealth spectrum) influence the course of society and governance (which are social objects, and therefore on the coercion spectrum). For example, look at how readily "freer" democratic governments break out when new military technology makes it easier to mount rebellions, and how readily authoritarian regimes break out when new military technology makes it easier to consolidate coercion. And look at how readily technological revolutions break out when a culture allows free exploration of possibilities, and how readily they die when a culture imposes direct control over what its entrepreneurs and researchers can study and make.
A testable claim that the Progressive movement might make, if these two continua are recognized as separate, is that minimizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to maximize their aggregate wealth, while maximizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to lower that aggregate wealth. The American version of Libertarianism seems to make the opposite claim, that allowing power disparities to naturally follow the individuals' innate abilities to seize and hold power will allow those individuals who are better at multiplying wealth to do so, while redistributing their wealth to those with less innate ability to seize and hold power is inefficient.
Even better, though, separating out those two concepts allows certain testable claims to be made more clearly - things like "we can redistribute coercive power without redistributing wealth, and regulation is one way to do that", and "all attempts to redistribute or nullify coercive power must use coercive power to do so, and will therefore favor those who currently have coercive power".
EDIT: Upon further reflection, I think it's not entirely true that people can't distinguish between these two concepts - plenty of people can and do distinguish between them, but then when they come to making policy decisions, they conflate them again. This looks like a cognitive bias at work, but I'm not sure which one - something that causes people to default to zero-sum thinking even when they know a situation has positive-sum solutions?
I might be out of my intellectual league here...and perhaps oversimplifying...
But I don't know that I accept the premise that wealth & power are separate (or even can be) in the way you describe.
I suppose it comes down to definitions. I'd say wealth is roughly "stuff you need and want"; power is roughly "the ability to get stuff you need and want".
In this sense, individual wealth is a result of power. And wealth also ensures the continuation (and even further accumulation) of power, as well as perpetuating further increases in weal...
In "The Immorality of Having Children" (2013, pdf) Rachels presents the "Famine Relief Argument against Having Children":
They present this as a special case of Peter Singer's argument from Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), which is why they haven't called it something more reasonable like the "Opportunity Cost Argument".
[Note: the use of "Famine Relief" here is in reference to Peter Singer's 1972 example, but famine relief is not where your money does the most good. Treat the argument as "that money would be far better spent on GiveWell's top charities" or whatever organization you think is most effective.]
It's true that having and raising a child is very expensive. They use an estimate of $227k for the direct expenditure through age 18 while noting that college [1] and time costs could make this much higher. Let's use a higher estimate of $500k to account for these. Considered over twenty years, that's $25k/year or $2k/month. This puts it at the top of the range of expenses, next to housing. It's also true that this money can do a lot of good when spent on effective charities. At GiveWell's current best estimate of $2.3k this is enough money to save nearly one life per month. [2]
But perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this money as an expense at all, and instead more as an investment? Could having kids be a contender for the most effective charity? That is, could having and raising kids be one of the most effective things you could do with your time and money?
For example you could convince your kid to be unusually generous, donating far more than they cost to raise. Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big. Alternatively, if you're unusually smart, by having kids you could help make there be more smart people in the future. But how many more generations will pass before we learn enough about the genetics of intelligence to make this aspect of parental genetics irrelevant? Rachels considers the idea that your having children might greatly benefit the world, and rightly finds it insufficient. While your child may do a lot of good, for the expense there are much better options. Having kids is not a contender for the most effective charity, or even very close.
Having kids is a special case of spending your time and money in ways that make you happy. A moral system for human beings needs to allow some amount of this. It's like working for $56k at a job you enjoy instead of getting $72k at a job you like less. [3] Or spending your free time reading instead of working extra hours building up a consulting business. Keeping in mind both the cost and that on average people don't seem to be happier parenting, if having kids is what would make you most happy for the expense in time and money then it seems justified.
(This is how Julia and I thought of it when deciding whether we should have kids.)
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] College is currently in a huge state of flux. Advertised costs are rising far faster than inflation as colleges realize they can get away with near perfect price discrimination in the form of "either pay the extremely high sticker price or give us all your financial data so we can determine exactly how much you can afford." At the same time online courses and mixed models are getting to where they can provide much of the value of traditional lecture courses, and in some ways do better. I have very little idea what to budget for college for a kid born now; likely costs range from "free" to "all you have".
[2] Rachels uses a much lower number:
Their Brenzel citation is to the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases section of the DCP2. The $205 number is "Estimated cost per death averted for the Traditional Immunization Program in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia" in table 20.5.
[3] This is a $16k difference, which comes from taking $500k over 20 years and dividing by two for the two parents, and then adding some for taxes. Though the earnings difference is likely to last more like 40 years.