[jseban]

> they just want fair treatment

There is no such thing as fair, it's impossible to even define what that would be, and that's the whole point of the free market, that it solves this problem. The more you use these outdated political catch phrases, the more impractical and meaningless things become. Life is unfair, nature is unfair.

> No one "prefers a society where everyone's poor", that's just childish and off-putting straw men by you.

This is demonstrably what happens as we have seen during 100 years of large scale experiments involving millions of people. If you keep pushing socialist politics from the 1970s I'm just going to suspect that the same bad things will happen, as happened then. When there is such a massive body of evidence, why should anyone suddenly start thinking "oh yeah, I bet it works this time, let's try that again"?

> Please explain how having a few billionaires "comes with the benefit of more jobs" and stuff for everyone else.

Because it's the only way to make people pull in the same direction, to create value in a positive bottom line.

> How is it better to share the crumbles, instead of the whole bread? Perplexing.

Because there will be no bread to begin with, if you share the whole bread, because nobody wants to bake a bread when they are forced to give away the whole thing.

[matsemann]

If you look at the state of the lower middle class and below today, and think capitalism has done wonders, you're delusional.

Countries with fewer billionaires and more socialistic policies are much, much better to live in today I'd say. Just compare US with EU for instance. So not sure how you can assert that the opposite "demonstrately happens".

Don't you think people would "pull harder" if they themselves actually saw the fruit of their labor? We're talking about people's livelihoods here, and you still talk about "bottom lines".. I'm not sure if you're trolling or actually hold these views?

[jseban]

Redistribution politics are always destructive and temporary in nature. The EU has not discovered some way to invent free stuff out of thin air. If you push redistribution politics you will cause stagnation and lower productivity.

You can think that's "chill" but sooner or later the outside world will run away from you and you will be outcompeted.

Just look at what happened now to the german car industry, they are so proud of their strong unions, but they get outcompeted by tesla instead who is now building car factories in germany. It almost got killed by the unions in the same way detroit was in the US when the japanese caught up.

Nice sweet union deals with lifetime guarantees of great benefits, mean nothing when the whole company disappears, and the country goes into a recession. It's just putting your head in the sand for a while and pretending that you have found the perfect position where opportunity will last forever.