[neffy]

That argument (Malthusian) goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. But since pretty much every technologist, scientist and engineer currently working can trace their lineage in less than 4 generations back to the working class, I think I'll go with greater and better distributed wealth and education solving more problems than it creates.

The fundamental issue addressed by positive incomes is simply that money serves two processes in economies that are at complete odds with each other, 1) a store of value and 2) the fluid that drives economic activity. The more money that is held in the fewer hands, the less well it is able to fulfil the second and far more important purpose. In the limit, all the money is held by very few people, and shortly after that, those people find themselves at the hands of a very angry mob.

Which just never ends well.

[aminok]

The Malthusian argument has never been tested for an extended period in a situation where resource usage has been decoupled from resource generation.

From the brief experiment we've had with massive forcible income redistribution (social democracy), we've seen the following:

* slow down in wage growth and improvements in life expectancy

* slow down in productivity growth

* explosion in the rate of single parenthood (perfectly in line with economic theory on how availability of resources affects child rearing choices)

But hey since 40 years of social democracy has failed so utterly, clearly we should keep blaming the free market and doubling down on social democracy.

[FullMtlAlcoholc]

> * explosion in the rate of single parenthood (perfectly in line with economic theory on how availability of resources affects child rearing choices)

This has more to do with the evolution of freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Any economic theory rooted in rational decision making is incomplete at best. We could lower this rate by going back in time when marriage was treated like a contract with the intent of producing viable offspring.

> * slow down in improvements in life expectancy

You mention that you're against any regulation. Cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States, making it by far the leading cause of death from cancer and on its own the second leading cause of death. This is nearly one in five deaths. I shouldn't have to bring up the behavior of the major tobacco companies in the past and how life expectancy would be now without government regulation.

Also, if you're going to blame this on social democracies and not that we may be reaching what the limits of human lifespan are in the anthropocene era, I don't know what to say.

What I can say is that we will likely see an uptick in human lifespan due to CRISPR related technologies (discovered at a public, government funded university with research grants provided by public and private sources).

Free market ideologues make the same fatal mistake that economists did when creating decision theory. They eschew psychology and replace it with the mythical rational, utility maximizing individual. Also, humans are horrible at pricing things and rarely take externalities into account. For example, is the cost of submerging pacific islands and displacing the inhabitants taken into account when doing things that release greenhouse gases? It's like a cult or religion that thinks they uniquely have the solution for all the world's ills.

> But hey since 40 years of social democracy has failed so utterly,

There is more to life than simply money. I'm not the biggest fan of social democracies, but I am thankful that I have things like the right to vote after Jim Crow was shut down. I am thankful my cousin was finally able to come out of the closet and marry the person he loves. But I guess since I can't put a value on that, social progress is irrelevant =P

[neffy]

I'm not sure why you think the extraordinary increase in world wide prosperity, general living conditions, health, and access to information that the last 40 years has ushered in is a "failed experiment in social democracy".

And if there's an explosion in single parenthood due to woman having more choice, because of these benefits - well maybe their partners should think about that a little.