Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on August 05, 2025, 08:39:00 PM

Being against plutocratic policies doesn’t mean I want people living in similar conditions as Venezuela or North Korea, this is an insane leap.

That's what you say, but basically that's where the “anti-billionaire” policies that you and the OP like so much lead.

Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on August 05, 2025, 08:39:00 PM

The OP is about the United States, not other rich countries who may have different policies.

The OP talks about what he wants, and so do I.

Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on August 05, 2025, 08:39:00 PM

36 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line, an amount greater than the population of many countries. Without even using the most extreme examples, it still isn’t true that poor Americans live better than kings. A bit higher on the income scale, there are still tens of millions of people who are lower middle class that rely on government subsidized food and housing assistance.

With the specific qualifier of three centuries ago, it’s still an absurd comparison. Scientific and medical advances have moved humanity forward over the past 300 years.

The comparison is, simply, sound. Adam Smith was born three centuries ago, and Karl Marx two centuries ago. The countries that followed the ideas of the former increased the general welfare of the population to an unimaginable level, despite the fact that envious people like Marx resented the fact that some people earned a lot of money. Those who followed the ideas of the latter all followed the same path: hunger, misery, political repression, and genocide. Three hundred years ago, the poverty line meant starvation, whereas all those you mention (unless they have drug addiction or similar problems) are overweight. Hunger was a constant feature of human history until less than a century ago, and it is thanks to many people earning a lot of money by mass-producing food that countries where people used to starve are now full of overweight people.

And the same applies to scientific and medical advances: what has most encouraged them to occur is the possibility of making money from them.