On being the right size (1928)

I would start as a first guess at minimum wage, or maybe the .gov definition of living in poverty. I'm not entirely sure what the problem with the equivalent of an amusement part "you must be this tall" sign is. We certainly permit it with real estate prices, where extensive zoning and regulation mean you must have a certain minimal level of productivity to live somewhere... why not the similar concept of a certain minimal level of productivity to work somewhere?

The walmart effect is they move in and 99% as a group end up net poorer while the 1% gets richer.

Maybe another way to put it, is someone with "enough" income provides for all their needs. Being allowed to pay someone less than their needs doesn't mean they magically just don't get their needs, thats why we call them needs. We just end up with a bloated .gov infrastructure to very inefficiently transfer tax money from more successful individuals to the poorer individuals. Its not like you're planning to starve them to death, are you? Either implement a bloated inefficient bureaucracy to steal from the slightly more successful or face outright revolution.

Take a macro view. Imagine walmart opens and collapses local labor rates for some employees below "the minimum". The next effect is walmart makes more money and .gov bureaucracy makes more money because now I pay more taxes so their kids can still attend public school, I pay more taxes for their emergency room medical care they're still going to receive, just more expensively than the care I get, etc. So the only winners in this scenario are the cheapskate welfare queen business owner who's not paying his fair share, and .gov bureaucracy middlemen who supervise stealing more of my money so the poor folks still get the same services. I'd rather walmart not open and the parasites get less money and everyone is basically richer because of it.

Your example of the coworker with the ridiculous lifestyle is spurious. You already pay her Dr bill. Its just we waste a lot of money on for profit middlemen. The other reason lifestyle is spurious is she's already being punished pretty severely, first of all she's sick which is no fun, and secondly she'd going to die young and capital punishment, however delayed, is already pretty harsh. We exist in an economic system where in addition to those two fun results she can also become impoverished which screws up her family horribly raising .gov costs even more for the rest of us, but one thing is certain that getting rid of middlemen and turning health care into a regulated utility can't possibly cost any more than it already does. Thats the point I simply don't understand about opposition to some form of socialized medicine... you're not avoiding paying $100 for her doctor bill, you're just paying $500 when she goes to the ER for treatment, and with a civilized system you'd be paying $50 because of lack of profit motive and lack of middlemen. So you're not talking about a net loss of $100 because she gets care, but a net savings of $450 because she gets better cheaper care instead of the existing "free ER" system, and you get better care because she's not clogging up the ER when you actually need the ER... Win win all around, except for the parasites and middlemen who like being parasites under the current system.

"Democracy does not end for us to plant fences"

I think it's important to consider the rights of the owner as well. If I am a captain on a fishing boat, and I built/paid for the boat, I can then hire fisherman to work on my boat. There are more fishermen than captains, if there is a disagreement between the fishermen and the captain regarding where they should be fishing and it was up to a vote, the fishermen would win.

What incentive does the captain have to invest in his own boat if he has no control over where it goes or how it is run?

Why don't the fisherman go build their own boat if they don't like where the captain is fishing?

The majority in this example microdemocracy is effectively stealing the boat from the owner by using the force of the 'state' to reallocate his resources to themselves.

Over time, we've developed abstractions called "dollar bills" that represent stuff people want. This allows me to have a more general form of capital--instead of having to exchange my "stuff people want" for what I want, I simply exchange it for money, and then trade that for what I want. This makes trade much easier--I don't have to find someone who wants 1,000 iPads in exchange for a piece of industrial equipment.

But I repeat--this is just an abstraction. To create $1 or $1,000 or $1,000,000 of capital, resources must first be used to produce things that people want.

Now, in our modern society, there are all sorts of ways to get ahold of these abstractions. Some people work for them. Some people are given them by family members. Some people make bets--at casinos, at horse races, or on the stock market--and win. So it is certainly possible to point at a given possessor of capital and say--"look! he has capital, but has not produced things that people want!" But that's the nature of people who own capital, not of capital itself.