I must disagree with the proposition that a democratically distributed income lacks a viable ethical component.

It is the case in my paradigm the money has no intrinsic value: it is a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and even to a limited extent a store of value (a limited amount, based on income, can be accumulated), but it has no intrinsic value like, say, gold does. To my mind, if the money is something that has intrinsic value, that creates problems for the functioning of the economy: its existence as something worth accumulating for its own sake interferes with its function as a medium of exchange. It seems to me that any paradigm that attaches intrinsic value to the money will have that effect. To overcome that effect requires action by some authority that could be avoided by having money with no intrinsic value.