Comment by shimman
21 hours ago
Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.
Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.
This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.
Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
>Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.
Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.
It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.
The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.
Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.
I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.