I appreciate your substantive reply.

"Part of the problem is that you feel comfortable thinking of the solution as an issue of economic redistribution – and that is essentially a failure of thinking of the same type that led us to the problems we currently have."

Well the problem is distribution, so the solution is distribution.

By Huey Long algorithm I mean that no post should be rewarded less than 3% nor more than 300% of the median payout, just as he proposed for income, shortly before his assassination, during the Great Depression.

We disagree about a lot of details, and despite disagreeing with you, I do respect your estimable intellectual understanding, which is why I asked you. Substantial disagreements are that we should decouple voting from financial rewards, or that we should favor profiteering as code now does. I reckon the inflation rewards mechanism enables folks to see the value of their upvotes as 'free money', even though it's not true, and this is not the same in a tipping platform where those upvotes come out of their wallets.

Frankly, it's a stroke of marketing genius, and it'd be the last thing I removed from Steem. However the median payout on a post is about 1500% lower than the average, because some few posts are manipulated by stake so that profit from them is sucked into the wallets of whales, and this is a lot of the reason for dismal user retention, and failure of the market for Steem to grow. Whales extract ~90% of rewards using stake weighting. HF21 makes the problem of profiteering worse, and it is demonstrable that profiteering destroys. It is the opposite of investing, decreasing the price of an investment vehicle, while investing for capital gains is focused on raising the price. I submit examples of profiteering as Bain Capital Partners, and of investing for capital gains of Berkshire Hathaway, and note that BCP does profit the partners, but cause other investors to suffer losses, as well as clients, employees, the companies themselves, and the communities they are in. BH makes far more money by not selling the assets of the undervalued companies they invest in by improving their products and market share, and produce the opposite effect on clients, employees, the companies themselves, and their communities.

Society is the source of value of any money, and user retention grows the size of the market, which enabling Steem rewards to encourage authors has done, and would do again, I believe. Every HF has serially increased the ability of stake weighting to extract rewards, and the price of Steem has serially declined in lockstep with the decline of users as user retention has plummeted in response.

You can't solve a problem unless you address it.

Thanks!