the disparity of wealth makes people frustrated and angry, "why does he have so much and we have so little, yet we expend 3x more energy to get less than him?." if this becomes too unbalanced things like russia form, where the current gov collapses and certain characters find their way into office. this is almost never good. and taking another persons wealth is almost never the long term solution.
i advocate worker cooperatives and decentralization, as seen in Capitalism: A Love Story (really the only good part in the movie, a lot of the rest of it is rubbish). i like it because it incorporates socialism and "laissez-faire" into one. its not complete socialism because companies are privately owned by the workers, and it is laissez-faire because the government should have little to do with it once its set up (government involvement is almost required to get it started big). it should be encouraged by government through cheap loans and low taxes at first. once success is verified, people will see how great it is and do it willingly. a final note, not everyone in the cooperatives would get exactly equal pay and power inside the company would not be exactly equal. however it should not be extreme, say no more than 200% than the average and no less than 25% than the average. so if the average employee salary was about 50k, then the highest paid employees would make no more than 100k and no less than 37k. of course this is extremely generalized and there is a lot not mentioned. but one way a worker could make a lot more money would be if for example that worker worked twice as many hours or had more units of output than another worker. this would not scale exactly, but it should also be about a little less than 1:1, close to 8-9:1, more than enough reward, and it has the very small effect of benefiting everyone else inside the cooperative.
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Dunbar's number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.[2] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Even if the 150 person estimate is off, most people would agree that there must be some limit, after which the stereotyping begins. This is one reason that it is unreasonable to expect large human societies to naturally function like a big, happy family (sharing, good will, altruism, etc). Since it is not going to happen naturally, you will need some centralized authority to enforce the "sharing". The problem with this is that no one would know how to avoid the corruption of this authority, so it would become corrupted eventually... leading to inequality of some sort (even if it was a post-scarcity society). Even in star trek, the ensigns were always allowed to just die while the officers got the best medical treatment the future could offer.
i would suggest again worker cooperatives, and splitting populations into smaller more spread out groups. additionally "sharing" does not work. i believe in working for what you get and getting paid for how much you worked, and the current system does not do that. some people get paid a lot for little work, some get paid little for a lot of work, and some get paid for doing nothing.
and you bring up a very interesting thought, medical care. i would suggest this video. it illustrates indirectly the idea of a lack of competition in the medical field. and usually competition brings down prices, and according to the video, there is very little because "somebody else pays". im not saying there should be no insurance, but i definitely think insurance should not cover silly things like flu shots, useless and socially controversial procedures. useless would be things like cosmetic surgery (besides birth defects and accidental injuries like burns and such). socially controversial would be things like sex changes and abortions. at heart medical insurance should be just that, insurance that if/when you do get majorly hurt or sick, you will be covered, not for an ER trip for the sniffles.
