hi bridgebuilder,
i remember making these arguments in my days as a libertarian. why have a minimum wage when you can achieve higher employment by lowering wages? let the market decide.
so here we are substituting benefits for money. but it comes to much the same thing. the owner is offering the worker an opportunity by employing them. it's up to them if they take the deal.
this argument seems coherent enough, right.
but first, there's the happiness/civility argument - we don't want to create a society of many serfs and a few rich people - because the idea is to maximise happiness overall rather than to make a small number of people extremely happy and everyone else miserable. we have standards of decency and wish to avoid brutality. and what you describe is the opposite.
and then there are actually hidden social costs to inequality. an unequal society is an unhealthy one. sharing wealth (not so that everyone is equal, but so that inequality is not extreme) gives more people access to surplus capital. having more people with access to funds leads to more ideas seeing the light of day. wealth is created out of the middle class. creating a flatter wealth curve tends to push wealth towards the middle.
it is quite striking in the historical record how the concentration of wealth causes issues. we see much the same thing in the late 1920s and the early 2000s. financial collapse as wealth concentration hits a particular ratio. we see it in the french revolution and in the russian one.
haven't time to continue. but social darwinism really isn't my bag.
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