@goldberg,
goldberg wrote:
it's plain that every nation is in thrall to party loyalties , partisan divides, and institutional rot, not to mention corporate malfeasance, rent-seeking and the excesses of global powerhouses like Google, Amazon and Apple, which corner their own markets with top-of-the-line products and assorted technologies that are off-the-charts. Thomas Piketty, who is a French wit, calls this part of the root cause of rising inequality in his two books featuring this vexed issue. From his perspective, it's critical for governments to soak the rich and provide free education, universal health care, and affordable housing in order to create a fair-based place , where everyone is given a fair shake. Tellingly, it seems to be an exalted social goal that's worth fighting for, considering that widening income gaps, rampant special interests and regional disparities have already eroded our trust about the role of the state. Typically, a government is supposed to protect every citizen no matter his or her social status and net worth. Yet that's no the case in reality owing to the proliferation of nepotism or patronage networks mollycoddled by grandees or vested interests, who even fleece and buffalo paupers with impunity.
Indeed, I also have my doubts about Thomas Piketty's version of "Beautiful World." To my mind, the ideal world dreamed up by him is akin to utopianism, not even egalitarianism. You know no one raises objections to the idea of taxing the rich instead of Trump's tax cuts; however, it would be wrong to deprive of their power to run their companies and put workers on boards instead. I'd say it's hard for most people to rationalize this idea since what sets business leaders apart is their ability to think outside the box and their distictive business instincts. That's why Bill Gates or Warren Buffett is a respectable business leader.
Altogether, Thomas Piketty's attempts to dissuade people from rooting for oligarchy while throwing their weight behind trustbusters are laudable. And that may be the first step to build a better world.
Fighting inequality poses the risk of over-enriching the masses and causing them to waste more resources and maintain unsustainable lifestyles. This is because anytime a broad group of people gets more money to spend, business responds by producing more products and services for them to spend it on.
If you want to improve the quality of life of the broadest number of people, including future generations, you have to arrive at a vision for what is sustainable for a large global population, and then work toward that. E.g. how much energy should households use, how should people be transported, what kinds of products, services, and recreational activities are sustainable, etc.
When you arrive at a given conclusion, e.g. that it is more sustainable for soy to be eaten directly by humans than fed to animals to be converted into meats, then you have to find ways to convince more people to shift their consumption away from meats toward plant-based 'meats.' But the moment you try to do this, you get backlash from all the people and business-interests that don't want to reduce meat-consumption; so that's where the political nightmare starts, and there's no getting around it without using some kind of draconian authoritarian power that can simply make people accept that they are not going to get more than a certain ration of meat, or none at all. So if you would actually implement such draconian restrictions, you would have to endure an equally or more draconian rebellion against them, which would end up making things even worse than before.
That's why liberty is such an important governing principle, but it presupposes that people will be reasonable and make choices based on what's responsible to do as a 'government of the people for the people.' People don't want to use their liberty to be responsible, though, as much as they want it to get what they want and avoid doing things they don't want to do. So developing responsible citizens who use their liberty to govern responsibly within a republic is the perennial challenge, whether you're dealing with problems of inequality, unsustainability, pandemics, or whatever.
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