The human being you describe in your last paragraph is from the same economics textbook: A perfectly rational human being making rational decisions 24/7.

Both are simplified models that help doing some undergrad economics...but are absolutely insufficient to explain the world correctly and prevent the solutions of a myriad of problems.

I don’t care how complex the system is. If you aren’t letting me, the individual, determine what is best for my life, then you are coming from a place of superiority and belief that you know better than others. And you don’t.

In real-world "free" markets, the poor have their choices made for them by the wealthy.

For example, if you are poor and living in the tenderloin in SF, any give California assembly person has way more exertion on your quotidian economic choices than Jeff bezos.

Wealthy tell poor mothers to buy junk food instead of healthier (and cheaper) options?

Wealthy tell poor kids to watch TV instead of doing homework?

Wealthy tell poor that having a budget and sticking to it is a dumb idea?

Who owns the fast food chains? The marketing agencies? The land where the stores are built?

Who lobbies politicians to allow them to do anything they want in the name of profit? Who owns the media brainwashing the masses into voting for X or buying Y?

I'm sorry but literally everything is done for the wealthy and by the wealthy.

No. That happens naturally, while the parents are working at their second jobs.

As for having a budget and sticking to it, no one is better at budgeting than the poor, out of sheer necessity.

Why poor people would?

The wealthy control the society that...

a) ...has food deserts where poor people can't access fresh food and vegetables, and in many of these areas, junk food IS the cheapest option.

Learn more: https://www.moveforhunger.org/harsh-reality-food-deserts-ame...

b) ...has tons of enriching and educational and recreational activities for wealthier students compared to poor students. In addition, just being poor has HUNDREDS of correlating factors for poor academic performance -- it's very lazy to just say "poor people are bad parents who just let their kids watch TV, that's why they are bad at school."

Learn more: https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education

c) ... does NOT, despite your strawman point, ever tell poor people "that having a budget and sticking to it is a dumb idea." Every financial counseling service for poor people includes budgeting classes. But if you're a single parent of two kids with $1900/month gross income (well above minimum wage) and the median rent for a 2BR apartment in your city is $1200/month, good luck with that budget.

Learn more: https://povertyusa.org/facts

So, we might not blame an individual wealthy person but it's fair to blame the people holding the cards in society.

By the way, when people repeat the arguments above, it reads to many people as incredibly uninformed and displaying an astonishing lack of empathy. I don't mean that as an attack, since many people on this site pride themselves on their lack of empathy and their ability to never have to interact with any lower-class people, other than complaining about homeless poop in the Tenderloin.

One more thing: rarely, there are incredibly driven and talented and lucky poor people who break through every possible disadvantage of childhood poverty and become successful. Sometimes those people will reply to a post like this and say "Well, I did it, so it's possible! [fuck the rest of them!]" But MOST of the people in that situation developed enough empathy and real word apperception to realize the rarity of their success, and agree that society should strive to offer more pathways up for everyone.

There is nothing "free" about a system that favors the wealthy.

Within any system, be it a society a family or a friendship, communication is important to react to shifts and regain balance (or to restructure the system). Talking is not dictating, talking is talking and the other person can always respond.

Capitalism is not perfect; apparently it is the better of the alternatives we have right now.

In order to effect fundamental change, and find a better alternative to capitalism, each human being needs to fundamentally change themselves--yet apparently no one is willing to do that. As long as we let instinctual passions like desire, and social emotions like envy, hold sway over us so will continue to exist institutions like capitalism and fashion. And forced change (like socialism), without fundamentally addressing the underlying human condition, wouldn't achieve anything fruitful as evidenced from history.

So, I am not against and all for personal change and growth but absolving the economic system from change doesn’t make this task any easier. Humans are to a huge extent a product of their environment and it is certainly in everyones best interest to design “humane” or “prosocial” systems which allow humans to thrive and cooperate.

The key answer is contained in my comment -- to wit: "yet apparently no one is willing to do that [fundamentally change themselves]". Even most intelligently people, the demographics of HN, are unwilling ... hence the (mindless) downvotes.

Landfills are a problem because they're subsidized, because we'd rather provide free/cheap garbage pickup than have people throwing their trash in the street or the ocean. The alternative would be to not subsidize it and then penalize throwing trash on someone else's property with 500 hours of picking up trash. Then there isn't trash in the streets because either people don't put it there or there are plenty of people to pick it back up, and trash collection service costs enough that the plastic junk your plastic junk comes in makes it cost more than the alternative that produces less garbage.

Climate change is the same thing. You're releasing CO2 into somebody else's property, which should require their permission. Good luck getting permission from literally everyone in the entire world; might be easier to buy an electric car.

These problems were created by making concessions from the principle that interactions should be voluntary. If you're creating an externality then whoever is paying for that externality should have to agree to it before you can do it, and they're not going to agree to that without being appropriately compensated.

you can't import cars from one place to another, because of emissions. you do not have the rigth to roam on most of the world like you have still in some very select places (e.g. scotland), because of property rights and national security. You can't market any food becuase of public health. Etc.

so your capricious question is already done and answered for. individual choice is already banned in many aspects. and you are still choosing to not see it. including in your arguments for buying a smart fridge. you never had the choice either way.

The cost of disposal varies by where it is disposed, not where it is purchased or made. It makes no sense to add an arbitrary cost to a product when the receiver of that money is not the one dealing with the externality in the first place.

The same goes for carbon emissions; a properly managed landfill that captures released methane is in fact a method of carbon sequestration. Adding a carbon tax would merely create a new slush fund or dump into an existing one.

Proposals to add cost to disposal are meant to correct for these distortions - to really represent the collective cost to the world. This absolutely should not be done arbitrarily - massive, ongoing research should be done to ensure its correcting for these distortions appropriately. Rinse and repeat for fossil fuels.

BTW, a methane-capturing landfill is, at best, carbon neutral, not sequestering.

As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low. I live near an old one that was turned into a 50 acre prairie restoration space with about 2 miles of walking paths and full of wildlife. As others pointed out, burying carbon does sequester it. Methane capture merely prevents it from getting back out when it is nutrient and water dense (aka food waste).

2. Assuming that certain places have lower externalities doesn’t make sense. Aside from the global footprint of trash in general, there have been tons of rehabilitated sites but they will need maintenance and monitoring for hundreds years.

> As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low.

No, that means that most of the actual price is not accounted for and is dumped on the public instead.

> Often the choices made by "the individual" don't account for externalities that aren't built into the price...

You put "the individual" in quotes as if to critique some sort of free-market system based on individuals, and I wanted to emphasize that the system we have can solve those problems.

If I break down my spending, most goes on food (I have no rent/mortgage), the next biggest item are essentials like utilities/council tax/bills, then car bills (insurance, petrol, repairs), then the kids then personal luxuries for me and my wife.

Marketers might shape how I spend my food budget (ie on which brands/products) but I still need food. Marketers influenced my choice of car, but I still need a car with certain qualities (big, room for kids and bikes, reliable). If I had to pay rent, a vast portion of my income would go on that - how is this being influenced by marketers?

If PR/advertising/marketing became illegal tomorrow, people would still continue to spend most of their income on a place to live, food to eat, utilities, a car and their kids education.

Keep in mind that marketing also influences other people, including those whose opinions you value.

If PR/advertising/marketing became illegal tomorrow, people would still continue to spend most of their income on a place to live, food to eat, utilities, a car and their kids education.

Yes, and the commercial entities providing those services would have devised ways to influence you despite all those restrictions. Unless you’re talking about North Korea style society, where marketing is replaced by propaganda.

But perhaps instead of buying the cheap Japanese one, I bought the expensive German one. So marketers persuaded me to spend 20% more?

The idea that marketers are somehow controlling people’s lives assumes that without marketers, we’d all be living some kind of radically different lives. I doubt we would.

Of course fuel-efficiency complicated matters a bit, but in an efficient economy, engines may be replace.

Exactly. There are basic needs and there are desires. I’m talking about the latter. Note that to afford that extra 20% you might need to modify your life in some way.

On top of this, the commodification of basic essentials like housing constantly drives prices up to meet productivity levels. So, we're being more productive, but expenses are growing to match because, well, the invisible hand wants it that way, and who are we to argue?

There might be gray areas in the middle. Some rough ideas:

- banning marketing

- Incentivising talented people toward roles that are best for society, and their results will pull people

- Do people really choose what they want ? people want affordable housing, to see their kids more, that the job conditions to be nice, etc. They settle for cheap consumer stuff, because that's what our society is aimed towards. It's a choice.

So, yes. I do. And you do too.

We also don't need humvees. Or diamonds.

On humvees and diamonds - if people want large cars and diamonds, let them buy them. If your unhappy about fossil fuels, would an electric humvee be better? I could go through your or anyone's home and critique the usefulness of any number of possessions based on my own subjective definition of value. That doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong, or that you don't deserve such things.

We let the individual decide what is best for them.

It's possible to honestly acknowledge these failures and speculate about possible solutions without being a socialist. But apparently it isn't possible to have this conversation without libertarians asking you if you're a communist for even thinking about possible limits to no-rules-at-all capitalism.

Economics isn't so simple and only from the perspective of the buyer.

Markets do some things very well. They do not do everything well.

The basic idea of self governance is we surrender some choice in order to maximize personal freedom.

Applying market principles everywhere results in people being free to live under a bridge, or in an alleyway...

We can and should very seriously constrain markets, and or eliminate them for some things.

What is left will function much better because more people will be able to participate in a meaningful way.

The left is moving this direction, adding economic reform to it's standard social agenda for these reasons. The party struggle over it is plain to see.

Way too many people are in real economic trouble. Markets are killing them.

Markets aren't killing anybody, markets don't hold a gun. They are a tool to efficiently allocate resources via price discovery.

They are a very poor tool in some use cases and are a great tool in others.

Denying that is literally pulling triggers.

Attacking others doesn't help you make others understand the problems you are seeing.

I cannot, nor want to own how others take information like that.

Ignorance takes many forms. Willful ignorance tends to be one of the more painful.

Frame it all however you want to. Does not change the brutal impact we are seeing today.

There is absolutely no reason to coddle, sugarcoat these things.

If that is rough? Not my problem. It is our problem, and being brutally honest about it is the right thing to do.

Your regurgitatation of economic dogma is far too simple for the authoritative stance you’ve chosen to adopt regarding how to solve one of the most complex and nuanced problems... ever.

>The alternative to letting the individual determine what they want is to let someone else choose for them.

Really because we can’t use policy or regulation to have folks pay some cost for the impact their decisions have on society?

Your black and white view of the world is incredibly misguided. Your post reminds me of a recent commentator on FOX News stating socialism would turn the US into Venezuela... LOL

In order to get this stone, they literally dismantle mountains one block at a time, slice them into slabs and ship them all over the world. Again, all so rich people can have nice shiny stone in their kitchens.

And, though non-essential (down there on a hierarchy of needs), beauty is important to human lives.

Though again, they remove mountains for this, the shop produces a bunch of toxic, fish killing dust and sediment every day that's slowly killing me and my coworkers and destroying the planet.

But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential. They are luxury items. Many of the other jobs i've had were also along the same line.

Not that they don't make people happy or improve their lives I suppose,(though the people that got soapstone in their kitchen recently are in for a some trouble the first time they drop something on it or spill something acidic on it.) But, in the end, it's definitely not essential and detrimental to the world as a whole in many ways.

A country that only produces essential items (food, shelter) for its population is a very poor country.

Almost by definition, a wealthy country predominantly produces and consumes non-essential goods and services.

It gets really difficult to argue which non-essential goods are worthwhile. Is the art on the wall worth more than the stone lintel? Is it good art? Is it a second hand lintel?

It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this.

At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.

But what's wrong with being equal ?

And now we set these people free to live as they will. How long will the complete equality last? It'd more likely be a matter of months than years. Some would work harder and produce more enabling them to grow in resources which could then be traded for other things - giving them more than others. Others would go in the opposite direction and behave irresponsibly, such as by indulgence in drink or drug, and find themselves falling further behind. Others would make decisions such as having more children than they could afford to provide for and find themselves in severe issues. Others would simply make better or more astute decisions in general leading them to pull ahead.

It wouldn't take long before our entirely equal society was riddled with inequity. The point of this is that it's impossible for humans to be equal unless somebody enforces that equality. And this brings up two issues. The first is that the enforcer of equality is generally a group or organization that is going to be inherently unequal. Even a completely social system would require 'enforcers' of some sort lest the over achievers dare keep the fruits of their labor for themselves. The second is that you end up with radically warped reward scenarios. If you do better than average, you get stuff taken from you. If you do worse than average, you get stuff given to you. Failure is rewarded, success is punished.

These distorted systems of motivation and the inherent control required to maintain equality are the very fundamental reason that the numerous systems of equality we've tried have all invariably ended up the same. Human society only functions by people spending a pretty good deal of their time doing x when they'd rather be doing y. It's not hard to see what happens when you remove any motivation whatsoever to actually do x. It even explains the ever recurring trend towards authoritarianism and cruel behavior - it's simply an effort to try to force people to do x after you remove all their motivation to do so, and it just doesn't work.

In countries with socialized medicine, access to healthcare services is usually more equal than countries without socialized medicine.

So if some equality can be created in such an important choice, maybe it could be achieved in the less important choice of counter tops, if someone we're to bother.

Genuine question, which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal -- all I've seen are the bits where a dictator rides the coattails of communist ideology to subdue the people. I'm still learning about this part of history, so am keen to understand which bits were started "properly" from a communist perspective. It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.

As (IIRC) Galbraith says (paraphrase?) "in Capitalism man exploits man, in Communism it's the other way around". The thing is that communism at least seeks to gain equality, capitalism seeks to exploit others up to the legal limits imposed.

Private property of means of production and accumulation of capital were outlawed. It was the best attempt to follow Marx tenets.

> It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.

No. The latter were massacred in 1918. Then the remaining ones executed and sent each other to GuLAGs in several waves. Separation of wealth (even if minuscule on the scale of developed capitalism) appears to be an emergent property.

"Normal" is when you build schools, hospitals, community centers and affordable houses and you produce only several kinds of refrigerator for the whole world, streamlining their production and servicing. Not when you construct factories, warehouses, office skyscrapers and shopping areas where those same goods will be manufactured, stored, marketed and sold, by thousands of competing companies. That competition leads to a lot of wasted resources in exchange for product improvements of a questionable value, like, the availability of fridges in a variety of colours.

> someone needs to maintain our physical infrastructure and keep the lights on

Sure, but the strain on that infrastructure would be far less without the need for commuters to commute 2 hours to their job, in order to market the "best smart fridge" in an office.

Everything is deeply interconnected, and we really need to reevaluate our goals and interests as a society.

The base argument is that we don’t need 80 brands of deodorant, and the fact we have so many is a colossal waste of resources, duplication, and moral failure of society.

Whereas I see 80 brands of deodorant and think it’s a wonderful example of how hard entrepreneurs work to satisfy all manner of wants and needs, ultimately driving down the price of deodorant and giving me a range of options. A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me.

This is the fundamental difference in philosophy between real socialists (aka, not “keep the market but make healthcare free” milquetoast socialists but “make the private sector illegal” socialists) and free market advocates. I prefer a world that constantly competes to satisfy my needs, and all of the “waste” you see is just the process of satisfying everyone’s needs.

There aren't only two options - the free market, or soviet russia. there are many more.

In my opinion, there are never enough deodorant brands. If a new entrant wants to make a new product, it will succeed or fail. It may compete on price or quality, it may drive out another brand, it may expand the market for deodorant by targeting a type of skin sensitivity that wasn't targeted before, it may do any number of things.

But there will never be enough deodorants. There can always be room for one more, and to prevent an individual for trying to make another is the moment we go on the path to Soviet Russia.

Look at the impact near free college, the GI bill had on tech. People all over the place started shit.

It can and needs to happen again.

That perfect deodorant is denied us because the person who could produce it is extremely likely to be trapped econonically.

What you are getting is endless variations of the same shit from competing board rooms.

What is worth what to you?

Strong words. I'm somewhere in the middle. i'm not offering to send anybody to any Gulag. But taxing some useless products ? or structuring market competition towards real benefits and not bullshit ? sure.

This is a false dichotomy, and the happiest nations on earth have a mix of market regulation and individual freedom.

And, that's an odd dig at life in Soviet Russia. It certainly was not the worst way of life -- I've known quite a few people living in all parts of the world who grew up in the Soviet system and longed for it, wishing for a return to that way of life while knowing it'd never happen.

I'm not exactly in favor of a command economy, but seriously, how many of these 80 types of deodorant -- or any comparable consumer product -- are fundamentally different from one another, as opposed to being distinguished only by their branding and marketing?

GP made no general statement of this sort. Misrepresenting other perspectives is boring.

Parent poster said this plainly, I'm not sure how you could read it another way.

There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to focus on what people want. Some of us would like to live in a world with less crap ideas and products flooding our minds, with more problem-solving with an eye towards social and societal good

You could, of course, use political means to force people to fund your preferences, but that kind of a sucky move, don't you think?

Everything else about democratic socialism is much easier now in the 21st century. Chile had a computer planned economy in the 1970s that was literally just a bunch of telex machines in factories around the nation talking to a central mainframe in the capital.

Also, I think democratic socialism can work on levels other than the national one. Like, neighborhood or town scale. To be embedded in the U.S., such a community would need a to produce some kind of surplus which could entice the neighbors to integrate into the democratic socialist system.

That's true.

>> If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision.

People are not good at knowing(or at least acting) on what will make them deeply happy, happier over the longer term, or even just happy. Psychological research tells us that.

Add to that the power of advertising, so yes, people do want many things of little value.

Research may state that no one knows what will make themselves happy, but isn’t that one of life’s challenges? Finding happiness and purpose? I don’t need an academic paper to tell me happiness is difficult to attain.

If this involves things like burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels and shoving new phones down our throat every year, it is absolutely our shared problem that you are bad at allocating resources.

Edit: my → our shared

Sure.

But if people don't really know what makes them happy, maybe they'll buy a lot of useless stuff ?

I, and most people I know, are pretty happy. Not every choice I make turns out well, but at least it's my choice and I accept the consequences. There are a few chemically depressed people in my social circle, but it's pretty clear to me that they would be depressed no matter how you reorganize society.

Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy?

""Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. "

http://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/~myday/teaching/1001/SMM/S/1001SMM...

>> I mean yeah, there's a lot of tragic and unhappy people out there, but is it enough that we need to question the nature of our society?

There's really a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also unrealized potential.

And is the nature of our society so sacred that it's beyond questioning ?

Because it's not a smart move, historically speaking.

BTW, that paper didn't have any numbers in it, and didn't really help answer the question "Is that really true that the majority of people don't know what will make them happy?" The biases it enumerated are I am sure common, but do they dominate the lives of the majority of people? I am doubtful, especially if the proposal is "we will take away all your troubles, just let us make all your major life decisions for you (including, almost always, the ability to revoke the deal)".

Letting, or expeting, someone else to make you deeply happy when you don't know what would be it yourself leads to the agency problem. That is, how that someone else knows what your best.interest is, and why observe it.

Wealth is. I wrote an entire article articulating the point: https://killtheradio.net/economics/wealth-is-mostly-a-zero-s...

Only if you define cash flow as the goal of the economy and production. If instead it is to provide food, shelter, and services, there is no need to speculate on how effective the (non extant) invisible hand is because it is evidently failing.

The key seems to me is that the political-economic elite (and every society/country has them) in some of the more wealthy, but stagnant economies has decided that extracting money from the rest of their countrymen (including externalized costs) is more profitable (or higher utility) than trying to make productive economic growth. Basically, beggaring your neighbor pays better than a rising tide lifting all boats.

As a result, you still have countries/cultures that invest in education, infrastructure, manufacturing versus those who create influencers, renovate houses, and serve ads. I don't actually put most software/services (even search) in the second boat, because they actually help increase productivity. But don't argue that ad based social media, ad based reality TV, or MLM Yoga (and debt based post secondary educational child care) are more healthy for society than the lower profit businesses they replaced. Also, don't argue "picking winners and losers", because corrupt government officials (and captive regulators) are doing that in every country, but some of them seem to do a much better job of actually making things (and their people better off) for the last 30 years.

It seems to me to be a social thing... and maybe it just comes in waves as large groups of people become complacent and the elite just figure, "I've got mine". The poor and the workers pay for it, and eventually there's likely to be some fairly expensive social upheaval in the reckoning.

Off shoring your workers, exporting your IP for quarterly results, and keeping the kids ignorant consumers may make you a little money or keep costs low, and labor cheap, but only for a few decades. Eventually, you'll need to compete with those who have been investing.

It's not obvious (to me, at least) that more money moving around is inherently a good thing. Money may be moving around in relation to activities that make the world a worse place overall.

Let me give you the news: companies have like..., forever, being in the business of telling others what they should want or not. This is called advertising. This is essentially what every company in the so called new economy, large or small, does to make money. In a modern capitalist economy, nobody cares about the needs of others. The goal is to advertise what you want others to do and, if the advertisement and product presentation is good enough, make loads of money. In the end, the need usually is born from the collective pressure of using the same products.

And because that's annoying we have ad-blockers and TiVo and premium streaming and no-soliciting signs. There are better ways to market that don't involve disingenuously telling someone what they want.

No one in the comment section is going to address this?

[0] https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/23/3/369/475828 (although about therapeutic nihilism and not market nihilism)

Yeah labeling someone as having a mood disorder because of their economic perspectives -- which are perfectly and reasonably formulated -- is weirdly... cult like. It's not reasonable at all.

>Having a nihilistic

There is absolutely nothing nihilistic about that view point. Not even close? Perhaps choose a different label.

Actually, that's exactly how it works: we can't both own the same dollar. Duh.

I’m guessing you’ve never taken an economics course. Or if you have, you didn’t understand it.

“Making the pie bigger” (growth) is a thing, and it’s a thing that happens quite frequently. “Getting a bigger share of the same size pie” (zero sum) leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

Depends on your accounting. As a % of GDP, the economy is absolutely zero sum. And some useless sectors (finance) have been taking a greater share of GDP.

What's the alternative model? That the government allocates the scarce resources instead of the market? What makes government better at this for most things (allowing for some exceptions)?

Generally speaking, being in a rich or growing area is a good location for business because your customers spend more. Similarly, a thriving economy is good for business, not bad.

You aren't going to convince people that good things are actually bad by measuring things in percentages. You're just measuring it wrong.

On the other hand, housing when there's no way to build more units is an example of something that can actually be zero sum. If you move in, that means one less place to live for anyone else.

It turns out that over the last four decades, the answer has overwhelmingly been "accrue to a small number of people", and most people have seen almost nothing in terms of gains. A big part of the reason why is that there are entire industries (finance) devoted to that accrual. As a result, the continually-growing pie doesn't matter, because every time the pie grows larger, a few people keep taking larger and larger slices of it.

You come out ahead as long as the value of the thing you paid for is worth more to you than what you paid for it. And if it isn't then why did you pay that much for it, instead of just not doing it?

The real problem with this is that then I have to borrow money to buy the iPhone but there is no way for me to ever pay it back, because you never spend the money I borrowed so there is no way for me to end up with it again, meanwhile I'm paying interest on it. So everybody's got a mortgage payment when they should already own their homes.

But this isn't capitalism causing this, it's bad laws. Nobody wants to sell you an iPhone so that Apple will have more money -- they want dividends. Until you tell them that leaving the money inside the company (where it collects interest) results in no taxes but if it's given to the investor to spend or reinvest then the government will be having >40% of it up front. So they take their money as share price appreciation instead. Worse than dividends, but not 40% worse.

That causes capital to accumulate inside corporations, which they then use to buy each other, because what else are they going to do with it? So we get megacorps, which then destroy small businesses and corrupt governments and do evil. Because we tax investing the profits of an existing corporation in a new one, when that's the thing that we need to happen to reduce wealth inequality.

The third one is the worst for redistributing wealth but it's the one our tax laws give high preference to. That is problematic.

For example (and bear with me, because this is incredibly hard to believe) it is more efficient in terms of amount of food collected per hour to use a farming machine over a field of wheat than it is to chase a guanaco or some other rabbit with a bow.