What we need is an economy that works for most Americans.....

ThatRobGuy said:

While that wouldn't necessarily be my first choice for how to structure an economy, it's certainly not the main barrier to having an economy that "works for everyone".

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As a libertarian do you think federal meddling is going to fix the economy for everyone? That there is some benevolent motive from the federal overlords that is bound to bring us into utopia?

The whole framing of the issue as, "How the federal government can create an economy that works for everyone," is remarkably naive. It is just another symptom of the top-downism that is the problem in the first place.

zippy2006 said:

As a libertarian do you think federal meddling is going to fix the economy for everyone? That there is some benevolent motive from the federal overlords that is bound to bring us into utopia?

The whole framing of the issue as, "How the federal government can create an economy that works for everyone," is remarkably naive.

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I'm not that much of a "full blown libertarian" anymore...I was some years back

But that aside...

Yes, there are certain forms of competition in the markets that can lead to anti-competition (monopolies being the most obvious form of that) if left unchecked.


Economically speaking, there are certain imbalances and problems where the free market is too blunt an instrument to correct the issue in the timeframe it needs to be corrected.

If you want to see how things look completely unchecked, the country's business landscape would look pretty much like a series of these

...where the housing, store, and services were all provided the company you worked for, and you were paid in a special company currency that only worked for the services they offered, basically just funneling employee earnings right back to the company they work for.


I said it a few times in this thread, if you want to see a meaningful change in our economy in a way that works for more people, society needs to be less enamored with college degrees for the litany of jobs that currently require them, but don't actually need to.

mark46 said:

Actually, I think that it is likely that the stock owned is through work plans, so there are indeed a lot of shares involved.

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At 50k, the match might be 5%, so maybe 5k a year which would make a difference. But can the employee afford to contribute the 2.5K? Here is from google ai, the hard facts. "The average savings in the U.S. is a median of $144,000 in retirement accounts, but the lowest 50% of American households have only $14,420 in savings, and the bottom 25% have no savings at all." Still, better than nothing but it includes all ages, so I am not sure how much lifetime appreciation one could expect.

zippy2006 said:

As a libertarian do you think federal meddling is going to fix the economy for everyone? That there is some benevolent motive from the federal overlords that is bound to bring us into utopia?

The whole framing of the issue as, "How the federal government can create an economy that works for everyone," is remarkably naive. It is just another symptom of the top-downism that is the problem in the first place.

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There are things we can do to reduce monopolies and concentration of wealth. But there’s no simple action that is going to make things like housing and health less expensive. Housing is mostly not a Federal problem, and health requires things that neither party is willing to do. The federal,government does plenty of useful things. My concern is that voters want it to do things it can’t, and aren’t holding it accountable for doing the things it can competently. That is going to lead to a continuing parade of charlatans, possibly of alternating parties.