Quote Originally Posted by rong View Post
We all agree it's not right to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or sexual orientation (i assume), yet we find it acceptable to discriminate on the grounds of wealth. A kid from the poor side of town is far more likely to have less face time with parents, eat less healthily, go to a worse school, get a lower quality education, get less years of education, have lower quality healthcare, have a lower paid job and continue this cycle.

How is this fair? It's just pot luck who your parents are, not that different from race discrimination, especially when you consider the correlation between socio-economic status and ethnicity. But forget that really because race shouldn't be part of this argument.
It's certainly a problem, but most policy measures against this that have been implemented in industrialized countries tend to WORSEN the problem, not improve it. This is an issue that needs to be attacked with a level of finesse that states seem incapable of demonstrating.

As I stated above, the goal is to improve mobility, not equality. And social mobility is strongly correlated with the wealth of an economy. In the United States there is strong evidence to suggest that the great majority of people move through several different income brackets over the course of their lives, and this is what mobility is: the ability to move upward (or downward) in income.

Rich economies foster a demand for high productivity workers, which results in higher incomes. Higher income result in a stimulated supply of those workers, and when this supply is short, businesses become desperate to hire ANYBODY with a pulse and to train them to do the work. So creating an environment that encourages economic growth goes a long way towards achieving this goal, even in a completely anarchic society with no free education or housing or anything. Rich countries = richer (by comparison) lower and middle class people.

This is what I was thinking about resolving with the free food thing. It would mean no need for poor families to work as long hours which would mean more time for to spend with kids, kids guaranteed healthy food, parents able to spend the money the earn on better quality housing and children having a more equal start.


Now sure, food prices go up, but anyone who is too bothered by that doesn't pay it because they eat for free.
When you take a commonly traded resource and make it free, it causes a great deal of problems for the entire economy. There are just a ton of benefits of the profit and loss system that are crucial to the system, benefits that do not exist when a product is deemed free. Food with a price tag is always produced in accordance with the demand for that food. The price-coordinated demand is always accurate or a great deal of suppliers stand to lose a great deal of money.

Suppliers have huge incentives to innovate the product, either by making it more appealing to consumers or by making it cheaper to produce. These innovations ripple throughout the economy and affect things that may be vaguely related or unrelated at all to food. It is inevitable for a public food distribution enterprise to fall behind in innovation, and a couple of decades down the road be completely inferior to store-bought food, in price and in quality. And huge amounts of resources are wasted in the interim.

This doesn't address some of the larger issues I think capitalism creates, which is waste on an extraordinary level. You claim that capitalism is efficient and any allocation method not based on a demand and supply pricing mechanism creates massive waste , yet how does toys r us exist if capitalism is about the efficient allocation of resources? People struggle to make ends meet yet there are like 5000 different types of child's doll to choose from. Capitalism created that, which is ridiculous and kinda sick really, but money realised targeting kids with marketing was effective. That is not efficiently allocating capital, it's manipulating a natural market to avoid an efficient allocation of resources and instead maximise the amount the individual has. It's about a transfer of wealth, not efficient resource allocation.
I really hate that I already have a text wall because this is the paragraph I really wanted to tackle and I'm afraid you'll nod off by the time you get to this, but here goes:

Your toys r us rant falls under a broad category of anti-capitalism that I guess I'll call anti-consumerism. The problem with the anti-consumer argument is that I've rarely seen it argued in an objective manner, and thus I find it difficult to respond to. Yes, to you, that there are 5000 different varieties of toy in a world where some people want for food and shelter is ridiculous. But you need to understand that need and desire are very subjective things that evolve for individuals. I'm sure there are products you consider to be needs that I would find to be ridiculous. I "require" high speed internet or I would go insane, but a rickshaw driver in Nepal would likely find my need to be ridiculous.

That humans in a growing economy take on additional needs as their wealth increases to accommodate the costs of those needs is a beautiful thing, and not to be disdained. This is what we call "standard of living," and for the vast majority of people in growing economies on Earth, it has skyrocketed over the last 200 years. I hope in 2114 that everyone in the world can afford a personal robot assistant that they just can't live without, along with a retinue of robot sex servants and robot gourmet cooks.


Middle class families spend thousands of dollars on their children at toys r us every Christmas because it makes them happy, because they want those toys for their children more than they wanted the money in their wallet. They also were able to do this thanks to a world where they were able to make enough at their jobs that they had a comfortable cushion of income after buying food and shelter that they could blow it on items for pure pleasure. How is this not amazing for everyone involved? It creates jobs, stimulating free trade that is rapidly pulling countries like China and Indonesia out of abject poverty, and makes people happier than they would be otherwise.

And it is efficiently allocating resources. A plastic manufacturer had the choice of selling his plastic to a meat packing company or a toy manufacturer and the toy manufacture had the higher bid. The price of plastic went up a tenth of a penny, and plastic was thus distributed to its greatest need for the most accurate price. A teenager put in applications to work at a grocery store and toys r us, but toys r us chose to hire him more readily and at a slightly higher salary because they had a profit bump last quarter and found themselves shorthanded dealing with the increase volume. The going wage of a department store clerk went up a few pennies to accommodate the increased demand vs supply.