Rather than say efforts and intelligence, it could say merits and intelligence.

Anyway, the idea is, these people will not want to change out a system that rewards merits, but only to modify it, so that rewards are not completely proportional to merit. But it's a parable, it kind of speaks for itself.

So obviously this has something to do with Steem. What if Steem tried to spread out rewards more communistically? Well, that would be interesting. But lets say they wanted to spread out the high gains that can be gotten by some, a little better with all participants, still mostly tied to merit?

This is how I'd do it. I'd take the richest accounts, making up more than 50% of all influence or steem. Then I'd suggest that they pool together and get up half the ownership to agree to improve or modify the current system. To create a new government lets say.

Then I'd change it to more like n * log ( n ). But only for verified or real accounts. Everyone else would be maybe m^2 / log (m), where the maximum possible is the above formula. So almost the same disadvantage to small accounts but no advantage to large ones.

So you ask, how is this fair to those who lose money over this deal.

As the price of Steem drops the power to regain influence increases. Eventually perhaps enough witnesses/miners can agree to change the code. Those who lose money are paid out of the 50% that's been collected, such that they cannot complain about loss of funds. As the value goes down and as some cooperating rich powerdown, that which is owed also decreases. This is tricky but fair I think, especially if value is already trending downward.

What about those who've spent or exported their dollars?

Those rich who refuse to help are not punished, except they may not be granted verified status. If they are helpful to the system in other ways, having a little extra steem/influence is not a big deal. That of the 50% which is not used helps create some useful bots or goes back to the original owners.

Also the set percentage asked of each 100 or so 'rich' people, should probably be just from total Steem earned, not invested. (If all rich agree to lose some of their monumental influence, no big player will end up with extra steem/influence.)

Maybe a community bot that reacts to voting could be developed. It could even be like a little government who serves the community and whose actions are controlled directly by vote or indirectly by elected officers. If this entity has even 20% of total influence, all individual real accounts will be heard, despite size.

Rewiring the system, does not give you back the effect of influence over time, it just repays you more for what success you may have had. This may encourage back some who've left and it will encourage all who wish to join. Also positive feedback and general future success could increase value.