And it's not just that "those that are better at competing will have more property". Every person is free to make a variety of choices for themselves, including how much they prioritize wealth creation. Since each one of us has only one life to live, and only one way to live it (i.e., the way each one of us choose to), and so many choices to make, there's no way we'll all make the same choices. Some will prioritize love, others family, others art, others business, or some mixture of these and other things. And that's just fine. We can't all pour ourselves into our work the way Elon Musk does, and we can't all only pick great ideas to pursue, and we don't all have the same talent or drive.
> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things. It is possible for people to be allowed to compete for wealth and at the same time ensure those that don't want or can't compete have their basic needs like food, shelter and medical care satisfied.
Indeed!
If it is too easy to gather wealth so you can gather wealth without actually having to create any value (through corruption, extortion, monopoly, theft, deception, enslavement, etc.) then you will have the bad kind of inequality where most people are not compelled to put hard work to create value for others in order to create wealth for themselves.
Again, GINI does not differentiate between the good and the bad kind of inequality, so two countries with same GDP and same GINI might be very different. One may be on the rise, with a number of enterpreneurs creating huge progress and value and the other might have couple of oligarchs who were able to amass their wealth with corruption.
rent-seeking should be there too
EDIT: Ah yes, rent-seeking is a problem. That was identified by Adam Smith, and it's a problem that's as yet unsolved.
Or you know, just by taking the surplus value of someones labor.
Lets stop living in the 1960's. Don't take our impression of American business from history. Today its very, very different and very, very predatory.
Historically, people made little progress in circumstances where they could not amass and defend wealth. Property rights and working public institutions is what allows people to stop spending their entire time defending what little they have and instead figure out how to improve what they amassed (in other words progress).
Though valuing ancient goods at equivalent modern prices is debatable, it seems like a reasonable metric.
No, it's not a reasonable metric at all, because it ignores the fact that the vast majority of per capita GDP growth between the Stone Age and now is not that we have improved the quality of items that existed then. It's that we have invented a huge number of new items that Stone Age humans could not have even conceived. The huge growth in productivity and wealth from the Stone Age to now is not because we make stone tools that are that much better. It's because all they had was stone tools, where we have combine harvesters and backhoes and steel skyscrapers and railroads and container ships and airplanes and medical imaging devices and computers and the Internet and...
We still create beef because beef has value to us. So, sure the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless.
In the end combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gains.
I don't think it's 100x; I think it's a lot more. I was giving reasons why I think that.
> the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless.
I never said it was.
> combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gains.
Yes, but combine harvesters greatly multiply the productivity of a single human at harvesting grain, which frees up many more other humans to invent so many other things that didn't exist before.
Also, combine harvesters are only one of the things I mentioned.
I am not saying you’re being disingenuous, but you listed stuff without context. A 1% slice of a pie looks tiny, you need numbers to judge these things not lists.
The context is farmers and ranchers still make up 1.3% of the labor force in the US, but globally 28% of the population are just farmers. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.agr.empl.zs Sure, more productive society’s have whither output for everything but agriculture adds up to ~6% global GDP / per capita GDP.
Now, we can argue that today’s food is better, but meat and fish likely made up a significant fraction of the Stone Age diet. So, suggesting it’s more than 6x more expensive using today’s market value seems unlikely. Note, food going bad is irrelevant as the value existed at one point, and food is temporary.
PS: Of course the population is also ~1,000x as large. So total worldwide GDP should be ~100,000x as large by my estimate, if that makes you more comfortable.
If more than 6% of current GDP is from farming, which it is, then everything else adds up to less than 20x the value farming provides. That’s just simple math.
So, we can just compare agricultural production and absolutely ignore everything else because it’s already included in the above calculation.
PS: Now you can argue that you care more about the internet or healthcare than a meal. But, I guarantee you would quickly change your mind if you had not eaten in several months. Food is an absolutely required and unlike air and water not naturally available for free in vast quantities.
but how does it even work - what things on that list have actually remained unchanged? Is a chicken in medieval times really the same as chicken today, and that's just in the last 800 years, not in the last 5000.
And in what direction do you compare? I suppose the price going up shows the growth of the economy, but what does the price going down show. Let's take aluminum, that price would have gone down a lot since medieval times, because it has been very much changed by increase of technical abilities. So we must not look at that because it is no longer like the aluminum of medieval times, but if you can not look at and measure stuff like that how can you actually measure the growth of the economy where value creation takes place.
I would need to see some arguments on how this works to even begin to get past the sounds clever but also sounds wrong stage of thinking.
Of course nobody is doing this silly thing, but trying to think about how the way it is being done works seems to be equally as silly to me.
This should not be a controversial statement. Imagine a simple scenario where Walmart alone, represents the economy and they sell 100 units per year. Then Amazon comes along and starts competing and after a while Walmart is only selling 50 units a year and Amazon is selling 60 units per year. You could now argue that 10 units/year of wealth have been created.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you but it seems you are arguing that 60 units/year of wealth were created in this scenario?
Of course this is only a simple scenario where all the variables are fixed, in the real world there are thousands variables (or more) interacting with each other. Which is why IMO, it's overly simplistic to say that one person's prosperity is zero-sum but also equally simplistic to say that wealth is created independently of the rest of the economy.
The point is primarily one about productivity growth and that causes the economy to grow. Consider agriculture.
When we were all out in the fields plowing them with oxen the whole time, and grinding flour by hand with stones, we didn't have much time to be doing anything else.
The invention of water- and wind-powered mills reduced the amount of time spent milling. Add (in no particular order) the seed drill, the horse-drawn reaper, pesticides, crop rotation, scientific theories of plant breeding, combine harvesters, nitrogen-based fertilizers, insect-resistant bio-engineered crops etc.
Productivity in agriculture in the developed world has DOUBLED since the 1960s.
John Deere invented the self-scouring steel plow and became famous and wealthy as a result. Some of that wealth came as a result of people buying his plow instead of buying someone else's; but the economic growth that resulted from his innovation was in terms of improved efficiency in farming in the plains of the Mid-West.
Clean Water
Land
Natural resources
You can take your pick about which one runs out first/be consumed by a small group of ultra-wealthy, but one of them WILL run out first.
Increasing our effectiveness removing natural resources doesn’t increase the amount on earth, so again, fixed. We will eventually run out.
Desalination assumes that the ocean is clean water. Micro plastics would like to have a word with you.
We're so far off using anywhere near all of even the easily available natural resources on Earth that considering it as a limited quantity is fatuous. By the time we legitimately run out of materials on Earth we'll be able to colonize other planets or just create whatever we need through fusion and chemical synthesis.
Desalination for potable water includes filtration which removes microplastics along with everything else.
How am I moving the goal posts? I literally started out saying it's a fixed resource and the only way to increase is to colonize space. Your response is "but we can use more of it than we're using today" - sure, but it's STILL a fixed resource. We can move portions of it from one place to another. We can come up with creative solutions to utilize more of it than we are today. NONE of that changes the fact it's a fixed resource, and if/when we happen to use or destroy it all, it isn't magically going to create more on its own.
>We're so far off using anywhere near all of even the easily available natural resources on Earth that considering it as a limited quantity is fatuous.
*In your lifetime. If you look at the rate of development and destruction caused by humans, to claim we'll NEVER do it is RIDICULOUS. We'll never destroy the rainforest. We'll never take down all of the california redwoods. We'll never kill all of the bison roaming the plains of the midwest. We'll never... Sorry that I'm concerned for my great grandkids (if I happen to have any) and the generations beyond those, not to mention the entire human race. My purview of the world doesn't begin and end with me.
>Desalination for potable water includes filtration which removes microplastics along with everything else.
Uhh, no. The current method of removing microplastics from seawater includes using chemicals that are deadly to humans. Potable desalinated drinking water includes our tiny friends.
That's missing the point completely. No one is going to argue that a Helium, or Cadmium, or Carbon shortage will be the death of us all, and reducing this planet's natural resources to just its constituent chemical elements is depressingly naive.
When people talk about natural resources, they mean the functional elements of our planet's ecosystem that keeps this planet habitable for us. They mean forests, that regulate temperature and humidity. They mean insects, that pollinate our crops for us. They mean the glaciers, that create an abundant supply of fresh water.
We're nowhere near the level of engineering that we can replace the natural systems we're destroying with artificial machines. Not at scale, at least.
It is possible to create wealth. If I can do something that you can't and you can do something that I can not, then if we exchange services we can create wealth from nothing. I have more than at the start, you have more than at the start and nobody else is affected.
The maximum possible wealth I think is also not limited. There is always potential to take something and create something with more worth. Good, pure example is art. Painter takes resources that are relatively cheap and plentiful (paints, canvas, his time) and can create something of huge value to some people. Intel might take a bunch of sand and other resources and create processors from it.
There is also "intellectual property" which is not tied to any natural resources. Anybody can create something new (derive new chemical formula or write a book) that would be an example of creating wealth from nothing.
The "growing of the pie" is also a fairy tale though to mask the realities...
For one, the "growing pie" still manages to give some people not just most of the pie, but also to live the majority with smaller (in absolute size) slices than before -- stagnant inflation adjusted wages for decades, higher rents and houses, higher education costs, higher health costs, etc.
Second, even if the "larges slices to the average person compared to before" was true, we shouldn't accept a minority to hoard increasingly more of the growing pie. For one, because money is power, so those elites would have increasingly more power over the rest damaging democracy. Second, because people should be compensated (for increased productivity etc) relatively to the size of the pie, not just larger than before.
If an economy was scaled at 10 and now is scaled at 1000 (units of money), then it's not enough that those making 0.0001 now make 0.0002. Doesn't have to be equally distributed to all, but people in such a society should make closer to (1000/10)x not just 2x.
Wealth in society is relative like that, not mere absolute. I don't think those proposing otherwise would be happy to be paid 2x what a peasant made in 1700 (inflation adjusted of course), just because it's "more". They expect their compensation to raise in accordance with the wealth level of their society and relatively to the size of the pie, not merely as a larger slice than some past in absolute terms.
The point about higher rents, education, health costs, etc, is a miscalculation of inflation. There's a difference between two things:
(1) the undesirability of a 1000x/2x split due to increased demand for the fixed supply of land and genius doctors, which means the 1000x/2x didn't properly account for inflation, and
(2) the fact that it'd be way cooler to have a properly-inflation-adjusted 990x/12x income split than 1000x/2x, among 50%/50% of the population.
On the other hand, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have equal populations and a 10x income difference, and I'm not shedding a single tear over it.
Yes. But both things hold, and will (2) is "nice to have", the (1) also actively declines quality of life and prospects for many people. But sure, they have better gadgets than in the 60s, so there's that.
>On the other hand, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have equal populations and a 10x income difference, and I'm not shedding a single tear over it.
And Mexico has a very unequal population (a few huge moguls and tons of poverty) and its quality of public infrastructure, infant mortality, and other metrics, US begins to descend to...
E.g.: "Using a combination of data from Blue Cross Blue Shield, the CDC, and prior health studies, the report predicts millennials will achieve the new triple threat of being sicker, broker, and dying younger than the previous generation, Gen X."
https://www.bcbs.com/sites/default/files/file-attachments/he...
And Switzerland is usually even richer GDP per capita and average wage than the US, and with much better infrastructure, service, and quality of life (e.g. it's much cleaner, less full of homeless people and crazes, rarer to get shot by a cop, and so on).
It's almost as if you can have more equality without Haitian results...
The kind of inequality that is perceived as problematic is something different though. It's the rent collection that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.
Low-income rental housing tends to be quite exploitative.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/housing-rent-landlord...
They don't have wealth arguably because it's taken by those with considerably greater leverage.
Asymmetric parameters like avoiding regulations regarding 'full time employment' (i.e. Uber) is one very common way that employers keep workers down.
It's not always obvious either - just as H1Bs can create a lot of value, in many cases, they are point blank just used to suppress wages.
Consider many wealthy folks pay a lesser net tax rate than others due to income from capital gains - of course there is some rhyme and reason behind the fact capital is taxed at a lower rate than income, but one might argue that on the whole, this isn't really fair at all and is one of the primary drivers of inequality.
I don't think inequality is inherently a bad thing, but too much of it is bad, and we should always be looking for ways to get people 'empowered' into positions wherein they can create real value and grab a fair/share piece of the pie. And we have to remember there are always people who won't be able to do that, and that we have a responsibility towards them as well.
All your comments are hidden to most users unless someone who chose to see them vouches for them.
Plenty of the poor actively destroy value, see the sanitation nightmares that are homeless encampments in the Seattle area. And the rest of the poor don't produce life sustaining value. Wealth transfers in the US are exclusively from the middle class and wealthy to the poor. To say otherwise is simple demagoguery.
Most of the wealth from the poor is stolen through increasing rent seeking behaviors from landlords, insurance companies and lobbying. I could speak at length the ways banks organized things as to punish the poor by organizing deposits to occur after transactions so that they can charge overdraft fees or insurance companies deciding not to cover you because of pre-existing conditions.
You could go on at length about that stuff, but you'd mostly be wrong. Don't write checks unless the money is in the account to cover the check. Pre-existing conditions don't work like that.
Ultimately, if it costs $18000/year for a person to live and they only earn $15000/year then they are short $3000 and that money comes from the middle class and wealthy. When you factor in all government services and transfers this is what happens to over 60% of the country. It is objective reality that the lifestyles of the bottom 60% are subsidized by the top 40% of tax payers.
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
Chase has had to settle class action lawsuits due to the predatory way they handled overdraft fees [1] so don't feed me that bullshit. It was something I personally experienced and saw my parents struggle through due to the way they were paid and Chases scummy behavior.
As for pre-existing conditions that is literally how they worked before and is something that insurance companies constant lobby to go back to. Because when my mother had her stroke her insurance denied her immediately because they determined the stroke was somehow a pre-existing condition.
And ultimately your logic is incredibly flawed because profits and productivity has gone up while pay for the workers has not kept up. This isn't wealth transfer, this is the rich deciding to underpay their workers to the point that they can't survive working for them, which then gets billed to the government. Your logic also offers zero explanation why wealth is concentrating towards the wealthy because wealth transfer would imply that, you know, it's actually going to the poor people.
[1] https://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/chase-agrees-to-s...
I am aware of the complaints about how banks process transactions in and out of customer accounts. It's a moot point for two reasons. First, the complaint boils down to whether a bank making a checking account available is also an agreement to extend small value, short term loans to people. If you don't try to float checks then you will not be hit with overdraft fees. It's as simple as that. Second, it's irrelevant where someone spends their money. If someone doesn't earn more than it costs to maintain their lifestyle their spending habits only impact how much they get from others, not how wealthy they are.
As far as preexisting conditions go, denial of coverage on that basis has been illegal for ten years. The only reason to bring it up is because you want to prompt an emotional response from people who are ignorant.
Profits and productivity are, again, irrelevant. If the question is "Which way does wealth transfer?" The answer is simple to discern and simply requires that we know how much it costs to survive and how much a person earns. We know both of this things on average nationally and wealth is transferred from the top 40% to the bottom 60%. I linked to the government report that demonstrates this.
As far as this unrelated statement goes:
>Your logic also offers zero explanation why wealth is concentrating towards the wealthy because wealth transfer would imply that, you know, it's actually going to the poor people.
Someone can create $1000/year in value, and another person comes up short by $300/year in survival. The first person transfers wealth down to the second person while still becoming wealthier. This is pretty basic stuff.
As for your second point, calling 'profit and productivity irrelevant' is ridiculously flippant because profit and productivity doesn't come from the void. It's generated by people. So let me illustrate:
Person A is 'creating' $1000/year in value.
Person B is 'short' $300/year in order to survive.
Person A employs Person B. The reason why Person B is short of funds is because Person A is earning their value from Person B and not properly distributing that wealth down through labor to Person B. Ergo, the situation isn't some sort of 'wealth transfer', it's the result of someone not being fairly compensated for their work.
What you're calling 'wealth transfer' is the result of money accumulating towards the top, which results in the wealthy having to either pay more to support the bottom percent or let them die. Software engineers generate many more times their income in value to the companies that employ them. Which means money floats to the top as companies try to depress wages to maximize profit margins.
That's not how banks work. You go in and deposit a check they give you a receipt which tells you what day the deposit will post and when the full amount of the funds will be available. You are, again, functionally complaining that a checking account can't be used to force a bank to give you an interest free loan and justifying it by saying "desperately need [...] food or basic amenities."
Your economic model is simplistic. People with no marketable skill or knowledge are not having the value they create stolen from them. The value that comes from the businesses they work at comes from the founders, the investors, the people who had the idea, who developed the product and so on.
Considering I grew up in abject poverty, I'm sorry but I'm not going to let remarks like that fly. That doesn't deserve a pass.
B) The inability to produce enough to sustain yourself is the basis for defining poverty.
And I grew up in poverty too. My first real paid job paid three dollars an hour for farmwork -- in the 90s, and I thought I was living like a king.
You could turn the tables and say that the lower and middle classes subsidize employment terms that are favorable to the wealthy. To tax the top 40% because some subset of the top 40% can't pay the bottom 60% a living wage is just a way for the wealthy to extract further wealth from the middle class.
I'd say that both perspectives are valid ways to look at it, and won't pretend that either of them is "objective reality", but with a growing wealth gap it seems obvious to me who benefits most from this system.
EDIT: And 40% of the wealth in the USA as of 2017.
It’s deeper than that. Inequality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to own some proportion of the fruits of their labour.
When success in competition increases success in competition (e.g. compound interest), the game tends to extreme inequality. And when extreme success gives you power to change the rules of the game, people start to lose their basic needs.
What you call competition, others call being useful to your fellow human beings by providing a good or service others find valuable.
I understand why we should provide basic needs for those that can't "compete", but why should we provide for those that simply don't want to? Why should someone have the right to not provide something of value to their fellow humans while still enjoying things of value (food, shelter, medical care) provided by their fellow humans?
If you can contribute and don't contribute, then you shouldn't get any contributions from others.
We do have to keep in mind that right now nothing enhances one's ability to compete for property more than already having property.
People are already complaining about inequality of status and partners. Why is inequality of wealth less just than those other things?
> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things
I honestly don't understand why and moral arguments are not convincing.
When people are inhibited from meeting their basic needs legally by structural impediments to their progress like severe inequality, they sometimes try to meet their needs via methods that are destructive to society, like crime, whether petty or violent. That behavior is usually damaging to people, property, or the fabric of society.
This is a reason why such crime is strongly correlated with areas of endemic poverty.
People have a strong will to survive, one way or another. We can provide them the tools and resources to do so in a prosocial way, or spend the resources defending ourselves against the crime that results from poverty stricken circumstances.
We should note that there is such things as free shelter and food for homeless and anything above that is "wants" rather than "needs". Taking care of equal opportunity is fair, but doing anything else to accomodate individuals otherwise inclined to crime is not fair at all.
"This is a reason why such crime is strongly correlated with areas of endemic poverty."
I agree with the correlation, but I go further to say that poverty just accomodates crime (i.e. troublesome individuals having it easier in those areas for encountering less action towards prevention and countering deliquent behavior), and thus is at most an indirect factor to crime, not a direct one.
> We should provide them the tools and resources to do so in a prosocial way.
The reason why you default to this instead of simply defaulting to suggesting crushing any dissent (probably what was the default since the dawn of the modern era, and is the default in countries such as China) is because of moral values you have had instilled in you from your surroundings since birth.
>The reason why you default to this...is because of moral values you have had instilled in you from your surroundings since birth
Yes, like many people, I was priveleged to be raised to believe in justice, empathy, decency, and fairness. But I understand full well that those are not fundamental properties of the universe, but instead very useful fictions some societies have created. Do you not have a moral framework? Or is it perhaps:
> crushing any dissent (probably what was the default since the dawn of the modern era, and is the default in countries such as China)
Also, I've had stuff stolen from me and property damaged by people who probably wouldn't have done so if they had a better alternative.
Here's one to get you started: When a very small number of people have everything and a great many people have nothing, not even what they need to survive, those hungry desperate masses will have nothing to lose and every incentive to take what they need by using any and all means.
Next, try to think about what might be potentially lost when large numbers of people are needlessly dying. What contributions great or modest those lives might have made if they'd been able to survive.
I'm not suggesting you should be personally responsible for providing for every person's basic needs, but it doesn't take a great amount of creativity or insight to come up with pragmatic reasons why we might be better off collectively if we work collectively to minimize the number of people around us who are struggling with the basic necessities of life and well-being.
So if you argument is that we should increase taxes so another Mao doesn't exist, I'd rather just kill Mao.
You might not be sympathetic to your fellow animals, but you can bet that if a bunch of them frightened, angry, and hungry start circling because they see you as all that stands between them and survival they won't be very sympathetic to you either.
We already make a number of concessions to preserve a polite society. Keeping your fellow animals fed and making sure they have a chance to advance (something to work for) is a small price for security and stability because otherwise those things are impossible.
You can think of it as ransom, but I prefer to think of it as an investment in and routine maintenance of society itself and ultimately we all benefit and see returns on that investment.
You're probably right to not be afraid, but things can kick off when the circumstances are right for it. And we haven't arrived at this historical moment by being nice.
The fact is, however, that modern society doesn't fit everyone. Since we won't allow people to withdraw from society that means we're actively forcing people to live a specific way of life that some simply cannot handle.
Simply putting more pressure on those groups will result in the forming of parallel societies and in the long run that means that those parallel societies will form a separate culture and try to secede. If we stop that there will be conflict. History tells us such conflict will be very bloody, no matter who ends up on top.
This is a cycle that Western Civilization has dealt with for thousands of years. Personally, I wouldn't mind trying to break it this time.
Sometimes (although far less often than some people would like to assume) the person who withdraws is perfectly capable of handling the demands we force on people in our society, but they simply prefer to not participate. These people usually aren't sitting around all day collecting welfare checks, often they are the career homeless or living in isolated shacks in mountains. I can't really fault them if that kind of lifestyle is actually preferable to them.
We shouldn't assume it applies to anyone just because it applies to some indivuduals though.
Those rabid unproductive people are rabid and unproductive because society can't provide basic necessities such as 'housing' or 'food' or 'water'. They are being made rabid by people that would deny them the basics needed to survive.
Your argument is essentially 'Let them eat cake' and if you're at all familiar with history, I need not mention the possible origin of that phrase. When you create a desperate class of people willing to do anything to survive, you shouldn't be surprised when they show up at your doorstep seeking to drag you out into the streets.
I would lose money.
> boils down to "i don't care about them".
Exactly, I don't care about the poor. The only reason we fetishize them is because of Christian influence on society. You go to Japan and Singapore and we always praise them for clean streets. They don't treat the poor well.
If we raise taxes I don't think the people I would be giving money to have similar beliefs or values as I do, I don't think we would ever be friends and given the age we live in, I don't think they are part of my community, even if we live in the same country. Given we have so little in common I'm more sympathetic to people living in abject poverty (that don't live in the US) who truly have no chance of succeeding in this world without help.
I disagree. I'd argue the amount of money you "lose" due to redistribution is actually MUCH less than the additional value you are able to output due to social stability. You cannot be entirely decoupled from your environment - and that environment is rapidly globalizing. That's not to say that balance can't become skewed in the future, or that other communities haven't had bad balances elsewhere otherwise. But, its not a one or the other, its more of a balancing act. Some redistribution is likely good - too much is definitely bad.
Specifically, sister comments are arguing redistribution is likely net-positive for everyone at least up to the point of providing basic needs (food, water, shelter) exactly because without those things people become disruptive. To argue that "I/we can fight anyone becoming disruptive" ignores the fact that that fighting takes away from other productive ventures (and not to mention is a wee arrogant).
EG: I can make 100$ of value a day if I don't have to constantly fight for me and mine. Forfeiting 30$ of it makes sure that everyone around me is happy enough not to threaten me. If they were starving and began threatening me (or my tools), my output drops to 10$ because i spend most of my efforts in looking out for myself/mine rather than collaborating. I'm now MUCH worse off than if i participated in some well-moderated redistribution.
If you disagree with the $100-$10 output reduction, i recommend you go try to do the same job you do now in a war-torn or economically repressed country (odds are you won't be able to find it, or it'll pay much, much less). I believe every developed nation has social safety nets precisely because of the economic sweet spot it enables.
If you want the poor to live in hell, move to the UK, the bottom end of the class system is exactly that even with free healthcare.
Where do you draw the line on unproductive? Hitler was a bum until he got into politics after trying and failing to 'be productive' in art. Your metric does not protect you from poverty, you can become ill and unproductive yourself, nor does it protect you from Mao/Hitler. They all became "productive" at some point.
The poor will always be with us, it's not actually possible to draw the line such that they leave.
How?
I get that there's a lot of waste and inefficiency in those industries. Whenever zoning laws prevent a developer from building new housing, that's a third party actively preventing someone's basic needs from being satisfied. Whenever med-school admissions hold the number of new doctors below that needed to service all the uninsured, that's a third party actively preventing basic needs from being satisfied. Whenever food just gets thrown out because nobody bought it or it didn't meat the supermarket's quality standards, those were peoples' basic needs that could've been satisfied.
But in most cases this inefficiency happens because of a quality/quantity tradeoff that society has collectively made in the past. When the Bay Area was first settled in the 1930s-50s, it was common for workers to move here, setup tents, and then go to Orchard Supply Hardware, buy some lumber, and build their own houses. Can people do that today? Absolutely not - we have building codes, year-long permitting processes, zoning requirements. Much of that original housing stock still remains, and is a disaster waiting to happen in an earthquake.
Similarly, a common response these days to the shortage of health care and the need to provide affordable health care is for nurse practitioners to get certified (often via online courses) to be a physician's assistant, and to use PAs for much of the routine medical care (coughs, colds, rashes, etc.) that takes up the bulk of a doctor's time. I have several doctor friends who have railed at length about this practice. They have an obvious self-interest in doing so, but they also have a compelling argument: children will die. For most visits, the PA just needs to tell you to take some ibuprofen, but in some rare cases, those recurrent bloody noses are actually a sign of a serious medical condition that needs treatment ASAP. A doctor will have run across those conditions in their training & practice and know what to look for, but a PA is very likely to miss it. Thus, you are literally killing children if you relax the regulations that set the bar for becoming a licensed MD.
Many of our current societal ills come because "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Unrestricted capitalism is very effective at "good enough" solutions, where the product is good enough for you to buy but may be a little rough around the edges or have corner cases that, well, kill you if you get unlucky. To mitigate the corner cases, we've added a lot of regulations that generally prevent suppliers from killing their customers through negligence, but a side-effect is that it's dramatically reduced the population of people who could be potential suppliers. That lets those few trained practitioners dictate the terms of supplying the service, so they can raise their prices until only the wealthy can afford to pay.
Knocking 2 or 3 years off would be easy. Right now, the first step to becoming a licensed MD is to get a BS or BA degree. Any degree will do the job, though it is expected that certain classes will have been taken. This is taking 4 years, but meeting the legitimate needs for medical school should only take about 1 or 2 years.
I'll work it out, based on what Yale specifies:
These are bright people, so assume that they have AP credit for all 3 basic sciences. That leaves 1 semester of organic chemistry and 1 semester of biochemistry. That's it. Checking prerequisites at UCF, biochemistry requires Organic Chemistry II. We could thus be looking at 3 semesters. Do the biochemistry over the summer, and it's just one year.
Despite this, Yale requires attending at least 3 years for an undergraduate degree. Yale doesn't care at all what the degree is. It could be music history, military science, creative writing, or whatever. You just need to put in the time, a minimum of 3 years. To help you waste time, not even a "5" on the AP tests will be accepted by Yale.
All we're accomplishing here is a supply limitation. We jack up the time and expense to become a licensed MD. We also shorten the resulting career by 2 or 3 years.
Throwing money at problems usually means that the people providing the solutions make more money. It does not necessarily mean that the problems get fixed. In many cases, it means that those people now have more resources to ensure that the problem does not get fixed, so that the government will keep throwing money at them to mitigate it.
In many cultures this is standard. For example, families taking care of their less fortunate family members (as long as they don't do something really stupid). Or another example, in many cultures, historically, the status came from being able to support weaker members of society. Especially in tribal societies the status would frequently be tied to how well you can make sure your tribe prospers as a whole.
The thing about lazyness & cynicism is that it's viral. When everybody sees everyone else around them pitching in to the best of their ability, they're inclined to pitch in as well. When one person starts enjoying the benefits of this without contributing, contributors start getting angry. When multiple people start doing this but there's no way to either punish or evict them from the group, contributors get depressed, and often switch their worldview. Why bother working hard for other people when the other people are not working hard in return?
Empirically, this seems to happen at a few thousand people, well below the size of a modern nation-state. The cultures you cite all have internal subdivisions (villages, tribes, clans) of around this size. Beyond it, the complexity of society grows to the point where freeriding cannot be detected & punished other than by institutional means (money, contracts, lawsuits), and so there's an incentive for everyone to freeride.
It doesn't even require malicious intent. Take the health care example, and imagine you're a physician's assistant. 99% of the patients who come to you just have a cough that they could've taken care of with bedrest & fluids. After seeing 99 patients, most of whom come from the more well-to-do if neurotic segments of society and none of them needing actual medical treatment, you start thinking "Man, all these folks don't have any actual problems, but they keep coming for medical care because it's free. What's the point in doing anything other than sending them home for rest & fluids?" The 100th person has aggressive lung cancer, but you send them home for bedrest and fluids, where they die. The PA's malpractice insurance covers the inevitable lawsuit, so they don't face any consequences for their cursory examination. They do, however, end up even more bitter about patients who are not only lazy but litigious too. The family of the deceased tells all their friends that the healthcare system is irretrievably broken, but there's nothing they can do about it - since it's a government institution, it's not like there's anywhere else they could go. Instead, it trickles down into how they do their own jobs: they get just a little bit more cynical about how much everyone else is pitching in to the common good, and decide they're going to pitch in a little bit less to keep the score even.
Equality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to compete for stuff.
If people are allowed to compete for property then those that are better at competing will have more property.
It might be possible to have property equality when people have access to same things but compete for different things, for example status, choice of partners, etc.
And the most important point people seem to forget:
Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things. It is possible for people to be allowed to compete for wealth and at the same time ensure those that don't want or can't compete have their basic needs like food, shelter and medical care satisfied.