[nicoburns]

> What if you could increase low end incomes while simultaneously worsening inequality?

If you could increase them more than you would be able to by redistributing wealth, then I think you should. But I can't think of any scenario where this is evenly remotely close to being the case. In practice we have plentiful but finite resources, and by far the easiest and most practical way to increase lower end incomes would be to redistribute our existing wealth.

[WalterBright]

> finite resources

Resources are infinite under free markets. For example, software. There is great wealth in software creation, yet it does not exist in the physical world. Even for physical things, they can be re-arranged to make the new arrangement more valuable.

[darkerside]

That is the beauty (sometimes cruel beauty) of capitalism. It's not up to you to imagine a way for this to happen. Anyone can imagine a way to increase their own wealth by creating value for other people.

Increasing income does not have to be increasing the number of dollars you make either. What if you made the same money, but it went a longer way? Like you could get cheaper healthcare, but good food for less, or have any other show up at your doorstep in two business days?

I'm not saying our system is perfect, and I actually agree that this is probably a good time to look at redistribution of wealth. But I think limiting others' creativity because of our own lack of imagination is a terrible idea that makes us all worse off.

[nicoburns]

Who said anything about limiting people's creativity. I do think we should limit how much we compensate people for their creativity (in order to balance compensating others for theres). But they are free to be as creative as they like.

[darkerside]

On second read, I think we pretty much agree

[andi999]

The size of the cake is not fixed. Excessive redistribution somehow leads to less cake production.

[nicoburns]

It's not fixed, but neither is it unbounded.

> Excessive redistribution somehow leads to less cake production.

Indeed, but emphasis on excessive. I'd argue that we currently have an excessive lack of redistribution which is also leading to less cake production.

[andi999]

Agree, a balance has to be found, I would say most of Europe is in balance. Cake could be (practically) unbounded, since (real) value can increase with actually less consumption of resources.

[nicoburns]

> Cake could be (practically) unbounded, since (real) value can increase with actually less consumption of resources.

I don't think this follows. Yes we can make better use of resources, but there's a limit. And given the huge wealth differentials (two or three orders of magnitude) it's feasible and even likely that that limit is lower than the amount of wealth available for redistribution.

[darkerside]

Go back 100 years and the way we have increased our resources would have been completely unimaginable. It would break any possible definition of boundedness that you could have thought of at the time. For all intents and purposes, trying to establish potential limits on economic growth is silly and destructive.