I kinda lost hope in our ability to have a useful conversation that time you made a clear and plausible argument about charity, I responded, and you said I completely misunderstood your point. Though your statement that "The world will be a tyrannical and biased place if aid is determined by the charity of individuals" makes more sense to me now. I don't think it's a good thing. I think it's a true thing.For once and for all, why do you think that's a good thing?
So in other words all this progress over the past 400 years - the betterment of conditions for workers, the increase in the well-being of the middle class, the decrease in infant mortality, the gains in longevity... is all that stuff fruitless? Is all that stuff pointless? Is all that stuff an affront to capitalism? WHY? Why. Should. Workers. Make. Do.I don't think it's a good thing. I think it's a true thing.
"If there are no public benefits, workers will have to make do with whatever salary they can get. Additional public benefits make them somewhat more comfortable, so they can be somewhat more choosy about employment, and if they receive sufficiently generous public benefits, they might choose not to work at all, unless they were offered a very high salary to make it worth their while." It's just a thought experiment, I am not advocating anything in this paragraph. My intuition initially was that getting some public benefits made workers more comfortable, so they would accept lower salaries. To check my intuition, I imagined extending the size of the benefit to extremes in both directions, from "zero" to "very large," simply to make the consequences more obvious. It's not a proof of anything, nor a recommendation of anything.
Okay, thank you. We'll go ahead and leave that question unanswered. Next question, why are you reliant on your intuition and thought experiments? I mean, you're basically attempting to imagine "Sweden." This isn't quantum mechanics we're talking about, it's economics. People study this shit for a living, using economic data and empirical experiments.