pancakes3 wrote:i think promoting consumption actually counteracts wealth disparity in this context. forcing the mega-rich to spend via wealth tax at least gets the balling rolling on trickle-down, as dubious as the effects of trickle-down may be. otherwise, the money's just parked in some hedge fund, or investment property.
I disagree. I think consumption is what allows for a collective buildup of whatever it is that we are going to produce but also increases the disparity over time due to power dynamics and changing technology. It just comes with the added perk of potentially improving the lives of everyone involved, just some more than others - though a lot of the inherent costs can also be hidden.
I do agree, though, that stimulating the economy is easier to do when the non-wealthy have money as they're more likely to spend it. They're just more likely to spend it in ways that disproportionately put it right back into the hands of the wealthy which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we're in at present. It's basically physically impossible for what few super wealthy people there are to actually consume enough to give that money back. And it's interesting to see that the billionaires who have made a collective pact to spend all their money before they die are also fighting against having to give any significant amount of it back before they do unless it's in ways that directly benefit themselves somehow.
It's why anti-trust is so important but also so tough to get right. If done strategically, a monopoly is always going to be more efficient than a non-monopoly. It won't be as open to change, but it will be extremely efficient. The benefits of that efficiency aren't going to be felt by everyone, though. And if we want those benefits, well, that's the tricky part. And if we decide those benefits are out of reach and we need competition (a reasonable conclusion) then figuring out how to structure that competition to avoid offloading of costs and gaming the system.
It gets immensely complicated. It gets much less complicated if people consume less. Doesn't mean the system can't still be set up poorly and problematically though it doesn't necessarily mean our standard of living needs to decrease, either. It just so happens that our current rate of consumption simply isn't sustainable and the world really doesn't care if we offload our pollution along with any manufacturing jobs to other countries (e.g. China) thereby increasing the general shipping consumption if decreasing the costs.
Edit:
Just to add another angle to the consumption side of things, we're only talking about a relatively select group of countries here, too. Most of these countries hide their continuing increase on consumption in very particular ways. One is in lowered birth rates. Our consumption is such that we are significantly less likely to choose to limit our consumption while supporting the consumption of someone else (i.e. our children). This comes with several significant costs, not the least of which is declining populations which means that we can't actually continue our production later on despite all the ethereal wealth that has been accumulated. We can temporarily solve that issue through immigration but even that is a short-term fix in the grand scheme of things, just continuing on with the Ponzi scheme until eventually someone has to pay the price for it. Of course, the hope is that someone else (preferably that we don't know) will pay the price for it somewhere down the line. And beyond that, people tend not to like immigration in general because they get the idea that others are coming to consume things where they live which will in turn have an adverse effect on their own ability to consume.
I don't have answers for any of this but it tends to be impossible to actually have an honest discussion about everything because everyone comes in with their own biases and isn't willing to even try setting them aside. You get the automotive industry pointing fingers at the agricultural industry pointing fingers at the energy industry pointing fingers at the manufacturing industry or however the never-ending cycle winds up working at any given point. There are potential fixes all over but nobody is willing to have them all happen at once because it would be too dramatic of a change and nobody is willing to go first because it would put them at a perceived disadvantage.
