It is about solving a problem, not a race about who want to do it. Wealth inequality is the problem. Even uneven distribution of loan/debt is a problem.
Wealth equality has been tried many times, and turns out to be an intractable problem.
In a fair world, financial success would be based more or less solely on a person's abilities, and their effort and skill in making use of their abilities. Since those things will have wide variance, there will be inequality, but that kind of inequality is ok (though we should still have a safety net to ensure no one must live in poverty because of their lack of ability). Our world is not fair: luck, ancestry, and unbalanced power dynamics (among other things) have an outsized influence on financial success. And I fear it will only grow more unfair as time goes on.
Indeed, and free markets achieve that better than any other system.
Even if that wasn't the case, we don't really have much in the way of free markets in the world, or even within legal jurisdictions. Regulation is everywhere, and markets are always restricted to some extent. I don't believe that's a bad thing overall (for example, I don't think we should go back to allowing unrestricted child labor, or rolling back gains in the minimum wage), though often regulation does create unnecessarily inefficient markets (e.g., many credit airline deregulation as the main driver behind today's comparatively cheap ticket prices, but deregulation has not made flying less safe).
If we were to remove all regulation and bring markets as close to full freedom as possible, I would only expect income and wealth inequality to get worse, not better.
(Also, for anyone confused, I edited my wording after the parent quoted me, but my meaning is -- hopefully -- the same. Sorry about that!)
I recommend reading about the Soviet economy and how it functioned.
Do you really think that under socialism, people stop lying, cheating, and exploiting others?
Note that lying, cheating, exploiting is illegal in a free market.
People of course lie, cheat, and exploit others in our current system (and of course did so in the Soviet system as well). Some of it is illegal, but unfortunately happens anyway, because people are often vulnerable and law enforcement can't help them. Much of it is legal exploitation, too, though. Making markets freer can never fix these problems, by definition. Restrictions can, though they can't and won't fix everything.
I don't think my point a few steps upthread was that restrictions on markets are necessarily the answer, at least not in all cases. We need a fundamental shift in humanity's attitude toward what it means to live and prop up others so they can also live. I'm not really holding my breath for that to happen in my lifetime, though. So we need more blunt instruments like income and wealth taxes, wealth redistribution schemes that don't create more problems than they solve. It's hard to get right, and easy to get disastrously wrong, but I think it's worth trying. Our current trajectory puts us in line to eventually become a world of corporate-run states, and that's not going to be good for anybody but the shareholders and executives.
I'm sorry, but you're not going to change human nature. Every system that has tried to deny human nature, or change it, has resulted in misery, death and disaster.
Why not work with human nature? That's what free markets do. Free markets lift people out of poverty. Look what happened in the US 1800-1900. Scores of millions lifted themselves out of poverty into the middle class. Every country that tries this experiences the same result.
> that's not going to be good for anybody
So far, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Netflix have improved my life in many ways.
The road to Utopia is not an all-powerful government that regulates and micromanages our lives. Freedom is the road.
Not once have seen changes to human nature.
> unprecedented growth
Are you sure about that? It was higher in the 19th century.
> only were unwound in the Reagan administration
Forgetting the stagflation of the 1970's and Carter's "Malaise Forever". Things got a lot better under Reagan.
The Guilded Age saw massive increases in the standard of living across the board. The notion that it was some hellish period in our history is unfounded. I've read "Titan", the biography of Rockefeller. The book failed miserably at presenting any evidence whatsoever that Rockefeller got rich at the expense of the poor.
Do you want your life specified and controlled by AI?
You wrote: "There are possibilities"
Enumerate the possibilities.
I would argue luck is the fairest system. Who has the right to complain to a die that their number didn't come up?
1. stay at home - luck will never find you
2. go out and socialize - luck will find you
For example, if you want to be a pro basketball player, you'll be more likely to get lucky if you start practicing basketball a lot.
Watch TV instead, and you have zero chance at a pro ball career.
Why? because there's uneven skills, uneven effort, uneven luck, uneven work ethic, etc, etc, etc.
As long as humans are involved... in all human history, in all societies, in all things there has been inequality and no effort so far has had any affect on it.
In fact, most efforts have made it worse across the board. Socialism and communism are failed experiments with a 100 years of history as proof.
Have they? Most social democracies seem to be going along fine.
There is a sliding scale between Hayek and Marx you know.. it’s not a binary choice
And the harder its pushed for "equality", the more it turns into bad times.
"binary" I never said it was... I said increasing efforts generally trend towards increasingly bad consequences - and we are talking about pushes to end "inequality" in this chain of conversation... the harder the pushes, the worse the outcomes.
At no point in any society has inequality been removed.
I think global inequality has drastically reduced these past 30 years. Don’t forget that 30 years ago for anyone in India or China the main prospect was subsistence farming.
And why are the consequences of curbing inequality increasingly bad? What is “increasingly bad” about the Nordic countries?
And this is patently false:
> no effort so far has had any affect on it
FDR and the New Deal reduced inequality in the US and most Americans thought that was a good thing. Stalin and the communists reduced inequality in the Soviet Union. Their methods were less well received. But the question isn't whether there was less inequality but whether it was worth it. There are many societies today that take active measures to reduce inequality -- Finland is an obvious example -- and they are generally considered extremely successful.
Why reduce inequality? Because inequality reduces social cohesion, promotes corruption -- it produces people who can buy government policy and action --, reduces democratic control of the government, and the mass of people lifted up by its reduction benefit much more than the few wealthy people suffer who are made poorer.
"new deal reduced" and didn't remove. Inequality has grown steadily with a wider range of "all boats rise unequally".
"Why reduce" the goals aren't in question... simply the results. You can say you want to reduce inequality... but if the end result is more inequality and more suffering? then your stated goals don't match reality.
"inequality reduces social cohesion, promotes corruption, reduces democracy" all things that happen in the march towards "equality" and "equity".
"few wealthy" the problem is, again, the results... the harder the push for "equity" the more likely its everyone who suffers - not just the "few rich made poorer".
Here is the first line of the comment you are responding to:
> You can't eliminate inequality but you can reduce it. We can't eliminate disease but there is still medicine.
That was the important part. Making things better is desirable even if you can't make them perfect.
Inequality has indeed grown steadily. This is not because of FDR's programs, though, but because of measures taken since and other events: reducing marginal tax rates, reducing inheritance taxes, the weakening of the labor movement, globalization, and so forth. Also, incidentally, by asserting this you are contradicting your own previous assertion that nothing anyone has ever done has had an effect on inequality.
My main assertion is the stronger the push to end inequality, the more it does the opposite... the strongest pushes like Communism and Socialism are easily viewable through historical examples - or using present examples (IE: Venezuela). Yet pushes to use "Social Democracy" to enact the changes have the same, albeit slower, effect of not working or causing horrible effects (IE: growing inequality).
"here's the first line: can't eliminate disease"
likewise, if you want to walk that metaphore... we are approaching a time where diseases are increasing resistant to medicine and we are making things worse by creating worse diseases (IE: MRSA and antibiotic resistant "super" strains). We work to "cure diseases", have short term successes and, ultimately, make things worse.
you can look at countries like Sweden that are held up as examples of how it should be done... and see an increase in inequality across the board.
"make things better" I'm all for working towards better... but sweeping changes generally don't work because of unintended consequences (IE: Globalization and higher taxes closing small businesses and hurting competition and rising prices and etc)
Maybe I could be more clear... but I stand by my belief that the harder someone pushes for "equality" or "equity"... the more unequal and inequitable the results are.
Antibiotic resistance is surely a problem but it doesn't indicate a general failure of medicine. On all other fronts medicine continues to improve, and even in the case of antibiotic resistance we aren't giving up. Phage therapy is a thing. New antibiotics continue to be found. We strive to prevent the mis-prescription of antibiotics in, for example, animal feed. And interestingly, the slowdown in antibiotic discovery is in part a market failure: it's hard to make back research costs with antibiotics, so the free market doesn't provide them even though we need them. It's not a good metaphor for free market fundamentalists.
> I stand by my belief that the harder someone pushes for "equality" or "equity"... the more unequal and inequitable the results are.
I won't argue with you further.
More or less prosperous? More or less stable? More or less able to innovate and deliver?
All the FAANG companies are American.
https://nordregio.org/nordregio-magazine/issues/state-of-the...
"From having the second-lowest level of inequality in 2000, by 2017, Sweden had the highest level of income inequality in the Nordic Region. The overall income inequality between households in the same municipality was also higher in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries."
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/a...
"From an all-time low around 1980, income inequality substantially increased, reflecting a strong rise in top incomes and income from capital, more recently also a widening gap between bottom and middle incomes. Behind this are the dual income tax system, established in the early 1990s, the introduction of earned income tax credits, and a diminished coverage of social insurance programmes, which widened the income gap between employed and non-employed during the 2000s. The benefit and tax systems became less redistributive and thereby contributed to increased income inequalities"
That's not really a winning argument if you're trying to claim that Neoliberalism is the solution, not the problem.