And lo and behold! When we fail to implement estate taxes, compounding investments ensure that the bloodlines of the well-off and long-lived become the rich elite!
Remember, this is a scenario where we're talking about 1% of the population getting life-extension while everyone else remains stuck with 80-120 years of maximum lifespan. Those indefinite folks are going to get very wealthy very quickly (as in, within one century), because they can afford to wait for long-term investments to pay off in a way nobody else can.
> When we fail to implement estate taxes, compounding investments ensure that the bloodlines of the well-off and long-lived become the rich elite!
Right, so compound interest isn't magic as long as you have taxes (and, actually, compound interest per se is rarely a problem when you have taxable interest, appreciation of capital assets that works like interest but isn't is the problem -- and it comes about specifically because of the choice to give tax-favored status to long-term capital gains.) Estate taxes are a mechanism that works to mitigate the problems caused by favoring capital income when death is a reliable periodic effect, but you could acheive much the same effect in a progressive income tax system, without sensitivity the frequency of death, by simply not giving long-term capital gains a tax-favored status, and treating income as income, especially if you add more upper-range marginal tax brackets for super-high-end incomes.
Yes, that's my point. Capitalism is bad, not increased lifespan.
However, given a capitalistic or otherwise zero-sum/proprietarian social system, I cannot support inegalitarian life extension as moral. You need a broadly egalitarian society and broadly egalitarian life-extension.
As long as we have social systems designed to maximize strife and toil, we should be working to destroy those social systems and replace them with systems for creating peace and happiness, yes.
Medicine and life extension as a public service is great. As a private luxury of the rich it's abominable.
Think about the implied statement of making radical life-extension available to the rich alone! "Whereas I will live to 160, you will only live to 80. Because I can afford these treatments, it means my life has double the moral worth of your life."
If you honestly believe that moral worth and financial net worth are two different things, you cannot support setting lifespan in accordance with money. Period.
Compound interest works intergenerationally as well as within a lifetime, so that doesn't seem to be much of an argument.