TFYS

Why does management turn efficiency gains into higher output quotas? Because competition forced them to. This is a feature of free market capitalism. A single participant can't decide to keep output as is when efficiency improves, because it will lose the competition to those that increase output. Labor organization could be the solution if it was global. Labor organizations that are based in a single country will just lead to work moving to countries without labor organization.

This problem of efficiency gains never translating to more free time is a problem deep in our economic system. If we want a fix, we need to change the whole system.

Even more detrimental to society is corruption, which this is. Who gives money to the leaders of your country and why should definitely be everyone's business.

> A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain.

We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.

The government "just mocking people" is already disgusting behavior that belongs to failed states, but it's not even that, it was clearly just propaganda to make the opposition look weak. If it was a "meme" they should've said so in the post before being called out.

> The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada.

Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence? And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?

You're missing my point. I'm not saying the west did anything wrong. I'm saying that if it did do those things, nothing would be different, and therefore we are just as much pawns of our leaders as the russians are.

There's plenty of propaganda on our side as well. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war. We would never know about it. The organizations in the west that handle geopolitical issues are not that different from those of Russia. They're not transparent or democratic, yet we rely on them for our information. They can probably steer us the way they want as easily as they do in Russia. The free media does not have access to the information it would need to truly inform the public.

That's no solution, since once someone has corrupted said small government, the obvious next step is to use the influence to increase its size and power.

A good location means more opportunities. Someone located in the center of a large expensive city will have a lot more opportunities to make money and meet people who have influence than someone in Elmo. A business set up in Elmo will not make as much money as a business set up in Monaco. This means that the best opportunities are reserved for people who need them the least.

This is very close to saying you wouldn't be against slavery. A slave could be given a decent quality of life. Does that mean slavery is acceptable? A person with 50 bazillion will be able to make you a slave if he wants to.

A cancer doesn't kill you as soon as the first cancerous cell division happens. It takes time for the processes of markets to develop into something that threatens our existence.

I think the problem with allowing even a moderate amount of inequality is that over time it'll always lead to large inequality, because after a certain level of comfort the only interesting thing you can do with with wealth is to attempt gain more power and influence, and are even forced to do it because if you don't someone else will. It's like the markets' tendency to consolidate. For example at the beginning we had "low inequlity" media where we had a lot of regional newspapers, but in a competitive system eventually the winners take it all, and now we have only a few large players left. Moderate inequality will be used to increase the inequality, because the people who don't do it will lose to the people who do.

I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.

While that's true, there's still enough "fixed pies" that inceasing inequality does make people worse off. Land, attention, positions of power, etc. will all be taken by the wealthy, because only they can afford those things in an environment of high wealth inequality.

The capital class chooses and presents the people you can vote for. They decide what issues are talked about in the media, they decide who gets the most funding, and they probably have ways of getting rid of or corrupt the people who somehow get popular without first being accepted by at least some people from the capital class.

Is criticizing dictatorships just envy? Because wealth inequality is the same thing as power inequality. Wealth doesn't just mean more goods to consume, it means power, and that power is mostly used to gain even more wealth and power. Eventually we'll have power concentration similar to a real dictatorship. Opposing such a future is not envy.

Despite what the free market religion has been telling for decades, we actually don't live in little parallel universes that don't affect each other. Even putting yoghurt on pizza has on effect on the world, not just the individual doing it. Not understanding this is what'll be the end of humanity. AI girl/boyfriends will have a huge effect on society, we should think hard before doing things like that. Slightly slower technological progress is not as disastrous as fast progress gone wrong.

The trend is universal because birth control is becoming universal. The only places that still have high birth rates are places where birth control isn't easily available (and religious cultures). It could be driven by other factors as well, but I'm betting it's mostly just birth control. We don't have a very strong innate desire to have kids, it is the desire for sex that human reproduction has mostly relied on. We're only a couple of generations into birth control, so we're only now starting to feel the effect.

Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.

Common man votes for the people the billionaire owned media and billionaire funded parties tell them to vote for.

Average standard of living can rise even if it decreases for 99.9% of people. Median standard of living is what you want to increase, and increasing wealth inequality does not help with that.

Corrupting a big government is much more expensive. Giving power from the government to the corporations just shifts the incentive from corrupting governments to corrupting other corporations. Want tariffs on goods you produce? Bribe a few top people from the biggest shipping companies (or even just buy that as a service, they'd probably sell it). I'd say that's much easier than corrupting a democratic government that has to be at least somewhat transparent in its decisions.

> so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power.

The biggest corporations would not operate in an industry with a lot of competition, the biggest companies are the ones that can get a near monopoly on some good. Without a strong government to break up monopolies, it wouldn't matter what people think about the companies, they'd still have to buy. Even if that doesn't work, a simple rebranding and a purchase of a propaganda campaign from the biggest media corps will do the trick. Even if the corps in control change occasionally, the people behind them probably don't change as much. The same group of the wealthiest people would likely own many of the corps, so it wouldn't matter to them which one is in control, as they all serve their interests.

A corporation in the absence of a strong government absolutely can imprison you and use violence, because nobody would be there to stop them. The richest corporations would be the ones who could afford the most weapons, and they would therefore be able to do whatever they want. Even if you imagine this weak government to still somehow maintain a monopoly on violence, a small weak government would be easily corrupted by the richer corporations.

In the book "The Logic of Collective Action" that's recognized as one of the reasons for why large organizations are unable to produce public goods without setting up some separate, selective incentives for the individuals. When society is composed of mostly large organizations, nothing can be done without either forcing people to do it (government) or using money as an incentive (corporations). In small groups it's possible for the group to act in the best interest of everyone (produce public good) without having any other incentives for the individual, and a part of the reason is the effect on reputation for non-participants.

Maybe this transition to large groups means that it's harder to produce public goods, since producing them now always requires setting up a separate system of incentives, which is hard and can be gamed.

> Best is decentralized city states with elite rulers.

Didn't we already have that, with constant wars being the result? Why would these competing city states allow freedom of movement?

We need to make democratic decision-making better, not get rid of it. Good dictators and kings are temporary, you always get a bad one eventually and the system collapses.

The US supported genocide in Gaza alone is much worse than anything done in Xinjiang. The genocide of native Americans, the bloody coups and corporate abuse in south America, the wars of the middle east with their millions of victims, the war crimes in Vietnam, the bombing of Japan and who knows how many more horrors that the US has been involved in. Do you honestly believe those things combined have less victims than Xinjiang?

The list of atrocities and political influence by the US is just as long if not longer. A country under the US sphere of influence is independent only for as long as its interests don't conflict with US interests. Before Trump the US might have continued pretending that its empire is somehow better than a Chinese one, but he threw that mask into the trash and set it on fire.

> No way. I'm shocked.

Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.

> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures

Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.

Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.

> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.

Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.

> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.

We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.

Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.