Once you have formal institutions with budgets to spend the administrators of the institutions discover they can get kickbacks, and then the budgets grow and grow. I hope it doesn't happen on Steem, but it's a faint hope.

I have actually proposed something similar to a universal income, in the Huey Long algorithm. It's just recognizing that non-bot posts that aren't spam or a scam of some kind deserve something, and no post deserves hundreds of Steem now that we pay 10% as a tax to support developers. Huey Long proposed back in the Great Depression that no one be paid less than 3% of the median income, and no one be paid more than 300% of the median.

I reckon applying that algorithm to Steem author rewards encourages newbs, who can actually get nothing today on posts, and eliminates financially manipulating the rewards mechanism by stake weighting, since 300% of the median post payout isn't enough to make it worth stealing. It makes a lot more sense on Steem than it does IRL TBQH. The median payout is around .06 SBD presently and thrice that just isn't worth the effort to setup circle jerks, buy botvotes, or self vote, which drives folks seeking return on investment to push up the price of Steem to attain capital gains for their ROI, which is good for everyone.