Comment by alphaoverlord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphaoverlord | Hacker News Reader

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Ayn Rand would like her pulpit back. jk

In the examples you cite, the benefits of progress in technology confound the changes you attribute to developments in policy and government.

If we look to only the recent example of India, it's decreasing poverty rate has been decreasing prior to "lessening of the socialist burdens" that you cite between 1980 - 2000. On page 4, it appears to be trending down in the 1970s and actually becomes stagnant in the 1990s.

Secondly, in the same study, for the time period you cite, India's Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequity, goes up.

http://www.ekh.lu.se/ekhcgu/teaching/401d4/poverty%20in%20in...

I'm all for capitalism, but I think it's misleading to think that it's everything for everyone. There are a lot of examples of great capitalism models as well as socialist models, and I think the idea of excesses in unregulated capitalism (ie. the cost and moral hazard of healthcare) are extensively documented.

I specifically focused on the standard of living of the poorest %20.

"income inequality" presumes that everyone should make the same amount of money. This is silly, and the only way to achieve it is to have absolutely everyone be poor.

The overall total wealth of the country, and the standard of living of the lowest %20 goes up more when you allow for capitalism.

There are no excesses in unregulated capitalism that I've seen because there is no unregulated capitalist country. The extensive "documentation" you refer to, that I have seen have been essentially easily refuted propaganda.

I do not doubt that there are a lot of people who wish to see society absolutely controlled, such that nobody is richer than them. But in doing so, they make everyone poorer.

Wilkinson & Pickett's The Spirit Level possibly did for laissez-faire economic theory what the Declaration of Independence did for the divine right of kings.

It is a statistical fact that people who live in countries which promote greater wealth equality are on average happier, healthier, and enjoy better relations with their fellow man. Redistributionism has won. As they say, live in America to get rich but in Europe to be happy.

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