It is the ineffectiveness of the solutions that upsets me more than anything else.
These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".
The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.
"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
My personal opinion is lowering costs needs to be given a far higher priority than redistributing wealth.
If we could radically lower the costs of health care and education in the US, for example, that would do far more for rising the standard of living than taxing and redistributing wealth.
And yet we should still tax (but possibly not redistribute) wealth. Wealth consolidation leads to power consolidation and I don't want de-facto monarchs/oligarchs in society running shadow operations (and especially (!) interfering with the free market in their favor).
So my rationale to tax the rich has nothing to do with redistribution, and more to do with power decentralization.
These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".
The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.
"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.