>We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible.

It is nigh impossible to live in this world like the birds do, flying from one food source to the next, roosting wherever you find comfort. Those with means have entire departments to police the underclass off of their property and setup obstacles to make sure riff-raff does not even get on the public property next to their private property (just look at how public transport is set up in big cities).

We protect those with means, ensuring those without cannot even live without selling their labor. Die or work. It's a little like slavery (I KNOW there are large differences between traditional slavery), you must be able to see that?

>but through the slow accumulation of societal benefits, over time, across an open market economy.

Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

>It is not and will never be "fair", there will never be equality of outcomes,

No one wants equality of outcomes, equality of outcomes would not seem fair to most people. Instead we want equality of opportunity.

We can improve, most of us know it, and even though most improvement will only effect our kids or grandkids, I will still keep bitching that we need to improve until we're AS GREAT AS WE CAN BE.

>Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

Yes. These improvements were won through the most thoroughly and deeply market behavior possible: raising the price on what you're selling.

Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

Don't forget that the initial response to labor price-gouging capital was to hire armed goons (like the Pinkertons) to break the strikes. The fight between capital and labor that ultimately led to something more balanced wasn't a purely voluntary economic transaction - there was plenty of violence involved on both sides.

And don't forget that a big part of why many Western countries started to invest more into welfare is because after 1917, their governments realized that the alternative could well be an armed uprising, and that they need to keep their citizens sufficiently content to prevent that - even if that means they have to force the wealthy to share more of their income.

(Note, I'm not saying that Soviets somehow achieved better results. The point is solely that the threat of a socialist/communist revolution was a significant factor in capitalist countries shifting away from unregulated capitalism and towards welfare state.)

> Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

This was a pleasure to read, although it made me wonder what the optimal unit of labor is to still have a functioning competitive market. If all capital was controlled by one entity, no market could exist -- that's basically why the US has anti-trust laws. The same is true for labor. Seems like for each market there must be an optimal unit of labor (number of workers in a union, for example), to balance well-being of an individual worker with functioning of the market. Hard problem, though.

Yes, the problems that monopoly creates are analogous problems to the problems with large unions. The union management seeks to increase their own power, and the larger the union, the more possibility to abuse that power. However, the upside of having an institutional way to apply political pressure for the benefit of the worker can definitely outweigh whatever abuses and inefficiencies most unions create.

> Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible.

Rubbish. Nothing stops you from wandering off into the wilderness, except for the fact that it's a crap way to live. You just feel entitled to the benefits of modern civilisation, without the costs.

And why should some people benefit from progress, while others are left to live in the wilderness? (Considering only few people actually contribute to progress.)

Because progress is the net result, directly or indirectly, of the work of everyone living in that society. When you pay taxes, when you buy things, when you select which products to buy, you're contributing.

So someone who inherits a pile of money, and spends their time doing nothing is contributing to progress?

Begin with fallacies and you shall conclude nonsense.

As a species, once we reached apex predator status, we were already born with the entire Earth's resources as our inheritance, not nothing. Somehow those got divided up and almost never was it via the mechanisms of an open market economy -- only in exceptional circumstances did those mechanisms provide a modicum of mobility, especially during technological transitions. The rest of the uplift was through outright redistribution, either through the occasional enlightened king's edict, the politburo's fist, or the exercise of raw political power in the legislatures of the world.

An unfettered open market economy that gets farther and farther from initial conditions ends in a revolution.

My guess is that a lot more people would support the redesign of how the land and natural resources are being distributed, but for some reason only redistribution of income generated from work is discussed in such conversations.

Land redistribution is indeed what drove many communist revolutions in the third world, more than philosophical differences about economic systems.

Maybe not what you intended, but I see your statement as a dichotomy, while the reality is more nuanced than that. For instance, most mainstream right-wing parties in Europe accept some kind of universal health coverage, which seems almost socialist in the US. Sure, I'd choose the US over Cuba or North Korea without thinking as my home, but several European countries, as well as Canada, before the US.

>Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread? Here's an excerpt:

>For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people’s sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

...

>The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner’s grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

>In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.

I'd really recommend a read, I used to think as you did, that we are born poor. In reality, we are born with the riches of the world around us, yet ungraspable.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...

I actually agree with much of that assessment; I just don't think it paints the full story over the arc of history. I also don't think access to and domain over raw materials or "riches" equates to wealth in the same way having access to charcoal is not the same as creating carbon fiber. Transforming those materials into useful technologies has happened exactly because of things like property rights (ownership), open markets, and the rule of law. It might not be perfect, but so far it does seem to work for our common benefit, over time, even acknowledging the hardships those toiling in the mines do seem to bear.

Its feels a bit myopic to pretend like the the miner mining iron ore 150 years ago used in the creation of a steam engine somehow only benefits from his direct wage, and not indirectly from the product he's helping to create. Yes, the direct monetary benefits accrue to the owners, but by and large those owners produce things of value (increasingly so) to society in a way that that makes that miner's great-grandson far far better off than a "lowest savage" today. I think this is the same false litany that tells us the world is getting worse and worse (especially for the poor), whereas data tells us the exact opposite.

So not everyone gets to be an owner and be directly rewarded, and that work is certainly hard, but we do all seem to share in the collective benefits ownership creates.

Thank you for the reference. I look forward to reading this.

The thing is that technology and society has progressed much further than our social and economical structures. I think the sharing economy is a great insight into one aspect of where we are going, but it isn't enough.

Most of the growth was being appropriated by "the 1%" of its time - see e.g. the Gilded Age - right until the point where the governments started forcing some redistribution through taxation and welfare programs. Until that happened, the social benefits were extremely meager.