Mr. Branthoover, I was surprised to see any response at all since I have very few readers. Your well-considered thoughts on this are therefore very welcome indeed.
Rereading your article in light of your response, it is clear that your primary thesis is about how prosperity is generally enhanced by institutionally enforced property rights. In my original reading, I was aware of that but the primary factor coming to mind was about personal property as a man-made problem which had to be solved using property rights. Small tribes often hold property in common and those who would seek to claim exclusive access to a part of that common wealth may be ritually reprimanded by all concerned. In medieval Europe, the property was protected by the security force of the Laird of the manor house. As ordinary folk began acquiring valuable personal property, despite lacking a private security force, that problem had to be resolved with a constabulary of some sort. All of us who own property have to recognize that it's value comes with the price of protecting that exclusive access.
In ancient Sparta (c. 400 BC maybe), most property was considered common even if it was in someone else's home. Borrowing and sharing led to a fairly simple and dull economy. The Spartan who came into inordinate wealth was shunned and demeaned until the burden of that wealth could be distributed more evenly. In Athens, around the same time, property rights were taken very seriously leading to a court system flooded with law suits and the occasional wealthy citizen pressed to outfit a fleet of triremes.
An economy is (I know you understand this better than I do) a very complicated system. If an engineer were called upon to develop an economic system for a million citizens within a democratic political system, he would first have to define, in understandable terms, the purpose and goal of that economy. He would then be hard pressed to define the many components that comprise that system. For each component he would have to define their behaviors, interfaces and control laws. Each component's control system would answer to higher level control systems which would ultimately answer to the top level control system responsible for implementing the defined goals of the entire system.
Every functional system as complex as an economy is organized as components and control laws even if no one designed them. Economists must surely think in engineering terms at least occasionally because the system being studied is also a system that is subject to manipulation. Such a system may or may not be stable. The unstable ones rarely last long enough to be studied.
With apologies for that tedious intro, I seek to answer your well-formed question.
Your question carries an implicit challenge to define initial conditions. Let's assume the economy is very much like that of the US and that $20,000 is generally enough to live on. There is no income or property tax because taxation can make any answer moot. Your question can be restated in system terms as follows:
Which is better: a control law that restricts access to money above a $20,000 threshold or one that guarantees at least $20,000 and lets you use it as you will.
The former defines a stable system wherein the limited resources available are applied uniformly throughout the system. The availability of resources, being stable, may be planned for and properly managed for everyone's benefit. The latter is what engineers call "open loop". Resources are provided and then the system is free to amplify those resources without limit until the ultimate limit (the resources available) are pulled to the part of the system demanding them starving the rest of the system of resources.
The first system is stable and manageable. The second is unstable and likely to fail catastrophically. Millionaire to billionaire to trillionaire to quadrillionaire, the system is not designed to avoid this wasteful sequestration of resources. Any system that does not regulate the use of resources, will fail and it is this side-effect of property rights that I was considering.
So, in answer to your question, I do dispute your assessment. I'm not an economist, I'm an engineer. If anything I've written here deserves further response, call me Julian.
