[blagie]

Growing the economy is not "like a bicycle, the slower it goes the less stable it is."

See everything from ancient Egypt to Soviet-style Communism. Periods of time in Ancient Rome would fit in too. The problem with those -- except for a repressive political system -- was that we could not produce enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs.

Today, we can.

Much of the US-style growth is driven precisely by instability. The system feeds on debt. That forces stress. That forces growth. That also means one cannot be "better stewards of one’s self, family, friends."

And so far, no one has explained how "we don’t foolishly bully human nature with policy." Legal and economic frameworks guide what humans do; that's either something we think through and engineer, or it gets engineered for us by market forces, but it's there anyway.

The most freedom-preserving policy isn't a command system, but it's not a pure market system either. And for stability, we can contrast stable economies to boom-and-bust cycles and successful democracies to the very many failed market-economy democracies across e.g. Africa and South America.