(Replying to PARENT post)
And it's not just that "those that are better at competing will have more property". Every person is free to make a variety of choices for themselves, including how much they prioritize wealth creation. Since each one of us has only one life to live, and only one way to live it (i.e., the way each one of us choose to), and so many choices to make, there's no way we'll all make the same choices. Some will prioritize love, others family, others art, others business, or some mixture of these and other things. And that's just fine. We can't all pour ourselves into our work the way Elon Musk does, and we can't all only pick great ideas to pursue, and we don't all have the same talent or drive.
> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things. It is possible for people to be allowed to compete for wealth and at the same time ensure those that don't want or can't compete have their basic needs like food, shelter and medical care satisfied.
Indeed!
(Replying to PARENT post)
The kind of inequality that is perceived as problematic is something different though. It's the rent collection that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.
(Replying to PARENT post)
It’s deeper than that. Inequality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to own some proportion of the fruits of their labour.
(Replying to PARENT post)
When success in competition increases success in competition (e.g. compound interest), the game tends to extreme inequality. And when extreme success gives you power to change the rules of the game, people start to lose their basic needs.
(Replying to PARENT post)
What you call competition, others call being useful to your fellow human beings by providing a good or service others find valuable.
I understand why we should provide basic needs for those that can't "compete", but why should we provide for those that simply don't want to? Why should someone have the right to not provide something of value to their fellow humans while still enjoying things of value (food, shelter, medical care) provided by their fellow humans?
If you can contribute and don't contribute, then you shouldn't get any contributions from others.
(Replying to PARENT post)
We do have to keep in mind that right now nothing enhances one's ability to compete for property more than already having property.
(Replying to PARENT post)
People are already complaining about inequality of status and partners. Why is inequality of wealth less just than those other things?
> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things
I honestly don't understand why and moral arguments are not convincing.
(Replying to PARENT post)
(Replying to PARENT post)
How?
I get that there's a lot of waste and inefficiency in those industries. Whenever zoning laws prevent a developer from building new housing, that's a third party actively preventing someone's basic needs from being satisfied. Whenever med-school admissions hold the number of new doctors below that needed to service all the uninsured, that's a third party actively preventing basic needs from being satisfied. Whenever food just gets thrown out because nobody bought it or it didn't meat the supermarket's quality standards, those were peoples' basic needs that could've been satisfied.
But in most cases this inefficiency happens because of a quality/quantity tradeoff that society has collectively made in the past. When the Bay Area was first settled in the 1930s-50s, it was common for workers to move here, setup tents, and then go to Orchard Supply Hardware, buy some lumber, and build their own houses. Can people do that today? Absolutely not - we have building codes, year-long permitting processes, zoning requirements. Much of that original housing stock still remains, and is a disaster waiting to happen in an earthquake.
Similarly, a common response these days to the shortage of health care and the need to provide affordable health care is for nurse practitioners to get certified (often via online courses) to be a physician's assistant, and to use PAs for much of the routine medical care (coughs, colds, rashes, etc.) that takes up the bulk of a doctor's time. I have several doctor friends who have railed at length about this practice. They have an obvious self-interest in doing so, but they also have a compelling argument: children will die. For most visits, the PA just needs to tell you to take some ibuprofen, but in some rare cases, those recurrent bloody noses are actually a sign of a serious medical condition that needs treatment ASAP. A doctor will have run across those conditions in their training & practice and know what to look for, but a PA is very likely to miss it. Thus, you are literally killing children if you relax the regulations that set the bar for becoming a licensed MD.
Many of our current societal ills come because "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Unrestricted capitalism is very effective at "good enough" solutions, where the product is good enough for you to buy but may be a little rough around the edges or have corner cases that, well, kill you if you get unlucky. To mitigate the corner cases, we've added a lot of regulations that generally prevent suppliers from killing their customers through negligence, but a side-effect is that it's dramatically reduced the population of people who could be potential suppliers. That lets those few trained practitioners dictate the terms of supplying the service, so they can raise their prices until only the wealthy can afford to pay.
(Replying to PARENT post)
Equality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to compete for stuff.
If people are allowed to compete for property then those that are better at competing will have more property.
It might be possible to have property equality when people have access to same things but compete for different things, for example status, choice of partners, etc.
And the most important point people seem to forget:
Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things. It is possible for people to be allowed to compete for wealth and at the same time ensure those that don't want or can't compete have their basic needs like food, shelter and medical care satisfied.