[sokoloff]

I would say the distributions from automated water heaters/boilers, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators replacing “ice boxes”, looms, assembly lines, farming combines, electric starter motors, and automated PCB assembly have been overwhelmingly good for people across a very broad spectrum of society.

Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?

[stvltvs]

We should be happy with a disproportionate amount of wealth going to rent seekers because they let us buy their goods and work in their companies making them even wealthier?

The wealthy always skew the rules to favor themselves, e.g. US capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than labor. The global standard of living has been going up but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.

[sokoloff]

People who create wealth for society by inventing and providing goods and services that others find valuable enough to buy are, by definition, not rent seeking when they do those things.

If you have complaints against rent seekers, that’s fine, but that’s not against “labor saving innovations” and it would probably serve you well to not confuse them, so you don’t inadvertently object to life-improving inventions.

[watwut]

> inventing and providing goods and services that others find valuable enough to buy

Are not getting rich. They get lower and middle class salaries.

[stvltvs]

Right, it's usually not the inventors, artists, etc. who reap the wealth generated by their creativity. The already-wealthy divert a disproportionate share of that productivity to themselves.

[xp84]

> but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.

Unfalsifiable claim since we can't predict what could have been if things had been done completely differently. But, Cuba distributes wealth more justly, so where are all the innovators coming out of Cuba? Where is the quality of life?

In fact, there are undoubtedly more Cubans building things, inventing things, and performing valuable services in the US than there are in Cuba, because in the US we allow you to be rewarded for providing something valuable to society.

If you turn the country into a wealth-redistribution paradise, the smartest people will all go somewhere else, because people don't want to work purely "For the Motherland." They want to help their country and provide for their own family's wellbeing too.

History has provided examples of this, but to top off their failure to deliver higher quality of life, most nations that established themselves explicitly to ensure fair distribution of wealth couldn't even restrain their elites from gorging at the "communal" trough to the point the commoners suffered great deprivation.

[stvltvs]

There are many alternative ways to distribute wealth, Cuban communism being only one of them. Capitalists would like us to believe in a false dichotomy between democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism.

Instead of Cuba, why not point to the sovereign wealth funds of Norway or Alaska? Or farmers' co-ops in the American midwest? Or just the generally successful democratic socialist countries in Europe where standard of living is better by many measures than in the US?

None of those are perfect, but they show that commerce and wealth distribution don't have to be purely "it takes money to make money".