>Here's a very non-random book I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

According to Wikipedia, that book makes the argument that economic equality will grow over time. It doesn't show that countries with more economic freedom grow slower. To copy from the "Criticisms" section of that wiki page:

" According to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, he merely assumes that inequality matters, but never explains why. He only demonstrates that it exists and how it worsens.[36] Or as his colleague Clive Crook put it: "Aside from its other flaws, Capital in the 21st Century invites readers to believe not just that inequality is important, but that nothing else matters. This book wants you to worry about low growth in the coming decades not because that would mean a slower rise in living standards, but because it might ... worsen inequality." "

>Also, do I really need to remind you that correlation is not the same as causation?

Indeed, fortunately we also have economic models suggesting such a relationship should exist so it's not just blind correlation.

The danger of inequality is not something new, and the problem isn't that someone is super-rich, the problem is that median purchasing power is going down, because economic growth is not going into the hands of the lower and middle class, and this is causing demand to fall in the market, leading to an inevitable economic downturn. The dangers of this were discovered a century ago during the Great Depression, and are well understood and not really considered controversial anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

> Ding-ding-ding - you hit the nail on the head!

Meta-comment: I find this style of argument (make one claim, have the claim debunked, make a different claim and say "see I was right") to be very annoying, and I wouldn't mind if it disappeared from HN.

You know what - I agree, the tone here on HN is important to me, and I'll try to do better in the future. In my defense, the comment I was replying to had linked to a bad-faith site claiming the tax rate of the wealthy in the US has not gone down since the 50's, which is only true if you don't count the massive number of loopholes that have been introduced over the years - the effective tax has gone way, way down (Warren Buffett even commented on this a few years ago, how he was being taxed at a lower tax rate than his secretary). That, combined with the way they simultaneously presented what I perceived as a counter-argument to their own previous comment, caused me to jump on that instead, and probably sounded a bit smarmy in the process - I'm sorry for that. FWIW, here's a source for the effective tax rate of the wealthy, which I probably should have linked to instead: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...

I will very happily argue for any of the points I've made, and I promise not to change topics and stay with a single point as long as is needed.