[TheOtherHobbes]

The UK's landowners have already destroyed the economy of the country. The country has food banks, literal starvation, and barely functional health, education, and transport systems. Industry has been almost completely sold off, and services are following in due course.

Overt this period the landowners have accumulated more personal wealth than at any time since the Enclosures.

Your point is naive first-order thinking about a third-order problem. "If we let people take billionaire stuff they may take my stuff" is nonsense.

What actually happens in redistributive economies is high taxation leads to high stability combined with high opportunity - not the false rhetoric of opportunity hiding a reality of very poor social mobility, which is what the US has, but genuine social mobility and business opportunity.

Huge inequalities are actually more like to result in revolution and war than stable economies where wealth is more evenly distributed.

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation.

This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

[hardlianotion]

I don't recognise your characterisation of the country. I agree with your broader point.

[repolfx]

Labour rhetoric. The UK isn't "barely functional", that's a ludicrous communist fantasy that can be traced back right to Marx, who tried to convince his readers of the dire near apocalyptic state of England by committing various kinds of fraud - like making up quotes and attributing them to the PM, or relying on obsolete government reports into factory conditions. Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents.

Nor have "landowners already destroyed the economy of the country". The UK economy is the fastest growing in Europe right now (of the rich nations), unemployment is at record lows despite a long term massive influx of immigrants: its economy is literally the opposite of destroyed. You're lying about the reality of the UK, whilst criticising others for being naive.

Shooting down your trad-Marx rhetoric with economic facts is easy so I'd like to focus primarily on this oft-cited belief:

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation. This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

But it is a moral point. The people who perform "seismic social dislocation" in response to (perceived or actual) economic inequality have a long history of performing that dislocation by shooting peaceful people, stealing all their stuff, building forced labour camps, liquidating all their political opposition and then turning their countries into hellholes. The communists who did all these things absolutely deserve moral condemnation and their acts cannot simply be whitewashed away as some sort of mechanical inevitability, no more than someone could excuse the Nazis as some sort of mechanical inevitability given the inequalities imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille.

Compare the fate of every country where your views have gained critical mass vs America. The latter is one of the world's most successful countries, if not the most. The others are all slowly recovery from absolute poverty, and recovering only because they finally turned their back on your Corbynite views.

[peisistratos]

> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents

I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.

Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".

You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.

Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.

Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.