[doctorpangloss]

You shouldn’t be downvoted, kind of a lame part of HN lately.

I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.

As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.

[deburo]

It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.

[Workaccount2]

Because of the incessant focus on billionaires/1%/.1% people are totally unaware that most wealth is tied up in the 70-95% group.

Any kind of "funded by the rich" program will mostly come from that group. That's why it's hard to pass these thing.

[doctorpangloss]

by all means, it is a positive redistribution from the "70-95%"...

[trollbridge]

Which means even more wealth concentration in the 1% and 0.1%.

[gfiorav]

Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)

Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.

However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.