Sometimes it's hard to explain something, and taking a moment to think of an alternate scenario can help bring clarity.

In a world where intellect is paid more, most crime ends. Intellect is something that must be measured, and that means having some kind of record to prove it. Being on a public register makes committing crime harder, but since pay is controlled by being on this register, you have a choice on whether to participate in society or outside of it. If the pay within society is high enough, and the risk of committing crime is high enough, then people would choose stability over crime.

Capitalism doesn't direct where money goes in the same way. A corporation can just buy a company that's already in an industry they want a part of, doesn't mean they're the best fit to run it, the best person for the job definitely does exist but it's also likely they lack an education and aren't wealthy enough to just buy a whole company.

This is a large part of why people dislike the idea of AI, because someday maybe an AI would be better at the job than them. But that's not the reason. Because they don't have the money to make the decisions, they know that whatever decision is made won't necessarily ensure they are able to continue their livelihood and may need to do something else they don't want to.

But that's the thing, it assumes everyone will play nice and just get other jobs. But what would that looks like, a world where suddenly a lot of creative people who have been pushing back against excessive copyright and have internalized stories of Disneys lawyers to the point we create anti-art-theft designs to trick scraper bots into selling t-shirts with those designs on them?

I think in the end people would group together online to find ways to sabotage things, some would target companies and governments, others would leak AI systems so that everyone can benefit and so that no company can assume it will retain leader-status in the industry. While most people (and myself) lack the ability to control this situation, there are enough people who can that I'm sure they will try what they can. Governments would label all of these as acts of terrorism, or whatever the favored term is by then, but the reality is that the solution was dead simple. Just pay intelligent people a lot, and their reason for fighting back mostly stops. Sure, some do it out of a sense of justice, but you can't keep that up for decades. And the people who are stuck at the bottom, unable to do anything about the situation and were never capable of hacking? They stay there, unless they study to do it themselves, and then they'd be paid more because they learned.

It's easy to see the flaws in an intellect system, there's the issue of people who are intelligent but may be unable to convey it without assistance that they can't afford. But the point of the intellect payment system was never doing the right thing, it was about taking the wind out of the sails of any rebellion. Money is the core of society, to fight society you must refuse to participate, but the promise of a lot of money, for the rest of your life, is tempting. Being rewarded for your hard work is tempting, defending what you earned is almost guaranteed. It is, in short, like a cult.

I think it's a good thing that there has never been a society that paid people based on their intelligence. Even presuming the tests are treated as sacred and must be fair to all, it can cause huge problems in the short term.