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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> but upper middle class represents an attractive target for a cash grab to pay for all those nice free rides he's promising to the poor.

TIL first world social services are "nice free rides promised to the poor."

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The free-market capitalism that you are espousing, requires a ‘cash grab’ —or distribution- to function or else it is completely incompatible with technological advancement. Looping structures allow programs to increase output and efficiency on the supply side, enabling startups to undercut company's reliant on manual labor. Advancements in tech allow a single person to run an automated script that does the work of thousands of manual workers (while greatly reducing the risk of human error). However, increased efficiency on the supply side decreases the value of human labor, which consequently decreases purchasing power across the board in every industry where a manual process is replaced. The more industry's that are efficient, the fewer customers capitalists can offer their products and services too. Capitalism can’t work unless there is some degree of a 'free ride to the poor', because the wealthy cant generate revenue if there isn’t a middle class to sell their products to. Its in capitalists best interests to have the poor become the middle class—i.e., because no one can create marginal revenue if there is no one to sell things too (or the value of the good being sold deflates). Without a strong consumer market there is no incentive for anyone to do anything in free market capitalism, because there is no incentive to do something that cannot create enough marginal value to meet ones material need, and because we are all finite beings reliant on external goods to persist, one cannot create value without meeting their material needs. Would it not be a more preferable for a centralized structure to provide everyone with the basics, so everyone could study what interested them and add value to society as a whole. If the govt invested say 60k in each individual, a greater # of people be able to work on advancing the quality of life for our species, finding new worlds to inhabit, and generally speaking — adding marginal value to the way we spend our time. Instead of minds thinking about physics, and how to improve things, minds are thinking about how to survive. Is this state of affairs not a huge deadweight loss of humanity’s time? A Sanders administration would hopefully be a small, necessary, and peaceful step in the logical direction.

    Would it not be a more preferable for a centralized 
    structure to provide everyone with the basics, so 
    everyone could study what interested them and add 
    value to society as a whole.

"From each according to their ability, to each according to his need." (c) Karl Marx. We all know how well that worked out in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but first world social services (by which I suspect you mean universal healthcare) aren't going to happen either, Bernie or no Bernie. For that to happen one would have to dismantle the healthcare insurance industry (which Obama had to give hundreds of billions to, in order to pass ACA) and screw over the doctors who currently charge an arm and a leg because they can (ACA does little to nothing to control the costs, which is why they are still rising). That's a trillion dollar industry, the best you can hope for is very gradual evolution in the right direction. It's "hope, change" bullshit all over again, except Bernie is very likely to keel over in the next 9 years.

You're free to your opinion! Progress occurs one funeral at a time (the US is slowly turning progressive as the 65+ cohort ages). Maybe it takes a year. Maybe it takes ten. People like myself just continue pushing in the direction we'd like to go.

Its unfortunate you're jaded into the idea that no change can occur.

Cohorts beyond 35 or so (also known as people who might actually have something to lose) are more conservative and they have always been. So your hope that conservatives will die out is naive at best. People turn conservative real quick once they have a bit of money in their brokerage and/or savings account.

Do you have a citation for that?

I was actually wrong: it begins at around 29. Then people become more and more republican until they get old, run out of money, and become reliant on government services again: http://www.gallup.com/poll/172439/party-identification-varie...

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