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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Inequality of resources ultimately destroys equality of opportunity. If some cannot afford to send their kids to an acceptable elementary school (no joke in parts of the US) and some can afford to buy a college, meritocracy is a myth.

If the choice were between no growth + equality and growth + no equality I too would choose growth. However, the period of the fastest economic growth in the US (1940-1950s) featured much higher taxes, much lower ratios between the highest and lowest paid, and much more economic equality. The idea that equality and growth are incompatible is unsupported dogma.

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>However, the period of the fastest economic growth in the US (1940-1950s) featured much higher taxes, much lower ratios between the highest and lowest paid, and much more economic equality.

This is a much parroted line, but it needs to be pointed out just how exceptional of a time period the 1940s-1950s were in the history of the world. The US at this time was literally the only functioning industrialized economy left on earth. All of Europe, Russia, and Japan were left in ruins. China hadn't even remotely begun to industrialize. Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America's GDPs were totally negligible. If you wanted to buy anything beyond raw materials, it came from the US.

We live in a fundamentally different world now, where we must compete in a fully globalized economy. The US has succeeded at competing in high paid, high technology sectors, which by their nature have contributed to the inequality of incomes we now see.

> The US at this time was literally the only functioning industrialized economy left on earth. If you wanted to buy anything beyond raw materials, it came from the US.

Except for Australia, as manufacturing in Australia was still a thing then. And there were a few other developed nations that survived the war with their economies reasonably intact.

The USA wasn't a total global monopoly. Nor was international trade as common as it is now .

It seems willfully disingenuous to attribute the growth of the 40s and 50s to high taxes. The growth and the taxes were both due to the most brutal war in all of human history. It was a transformational event for the United States including so many variables that it would be basically impossible (not to mention undesirable) to replicate. Pointing to it and saying "we can just tax everyone one like then and things will be better" is like pointing at a nuclear explosion to warm your house.

I like how the replies to this chose to focus specifically on the random mid 20th century example and thus ignore the actual rhetoric, which was quite good.

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