[jerf]

'Regarding your concern over monopolies generally, I am reminded of a wonderful Friedman response to the question 'When have you ever been wrong': "I used to believe that some anti trust activity had merit."'

I consider it a good and proper task for the government to ensure nothing, including itself, gets too large. That is not to say that our government today can do it. I'm not sure what to do once you pass a certain event horizon of concentrated power... well, actually, I'm pretty confident the only answer is to wait for the concentration to inevitably collapse and take some percent of society with it (historically, at times approaching 100%), but I don't know how to reliably make that safe, let alone painless. I'm not sure there is a way. I'm more interested in building robust societies that can survive disruptions than in trying to prevent them; there's pretty good mathematical reasons to believe that's simply impossible. To say this puts me out of the political mainstream would be putting it lightly.

Anyhow, it's not news to me that my preferred politics doesn't produce Utopia... I would be much happier if everybody else realized that neither do theirs.

[alexeisadeski3]

I enjoy our exchange :)

Unfortunately I do not share your confidence that concentrated power is inherently unstable or self destructing. What evidence is there of such a claim?

Even the most extreme concentrations of power, such as North Korea, in fact contain complex webs of mutual support within them when viewed up close.

To get back to the original topic, though, I just don't see how any non-extreme (below .9 Gini) distribution of income can be considered unstable or problematic in any way. It's not as if someone is simply doling out wealth and income; this stuff is created and earned!