Yes, exactly what ss7 and cns said.
But to take DQs question a bit further, I think we need more socialized components to our system. Just as it would be silly for private funding to finance an interstate highway, there are several things that I believe should be common goods that we all pay for.
And economics aside, there is no debate at all that the wealth inequality gap is widening at an alarming rate, and with that lack of wealth comes a lower quality of life. And I guess my philosophy is, we (as a society) should be trying to improve the quality of life for the population rather than actively making it worse. And no, I do not think that the quality of life delta for the billionaire that just became a trillionaire outweighs the tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands depending on how you want to look at it) of ppl whose quality of life took a hit so that one guy could have even more money
You think quality of life in the US has gotten worse? Over what time period? I'm fairly certain the data would disagree with you, even (especially?) for the poorest segments of the population.
I suppose that would depend on your metric. Like oh hey you have a smart phone with instant access and connectivity to the world, that’s outstanding! Also, you can’t afford rent. Or the rent you can afford to pay gets you less and less year over year. Home ownership will never be in the cards so I guess that frees up a lot of time you might have otherwise spent thinking about being a home owner.
Since we’re talking about the poor, I’m curious D, how do you suppose the minimum wage has been keeping up with inflation? Probably pretty close, right?
It hasn't.
I never said capitalism was perfect or that i'm against any regulation at all. I'm just saying capitalism (at least conceptually) is the best we got. You can say this or that ought to be tweaked (i.e. "we need more socialized elements"), and I won't fight you too hard on the margins. If you think we need a more robust anti-trust framework and enforcement, power to you.
But when you imply that QoL in the US has gone down over the last 20/50/100 years, I don't know how you're measuring that outside of your vague rent as a percentage of income (which is important, but far from the
only QoL indicator). Do you have any data about what percentage of income rent was for the various percentiles decade by decade? That would be interesting.
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