> The Gilded Age was a time of great prosperity in the US.

In aggregate, sure. (At least compared to times prior.)

How the prosperity was distributed, OTOH...

Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market. People work and invest to get money in exchange.

Consider Jeff Bezos. He was roundly criticized for the profligacy of spending $80 million for his wedding. But look at it another way. He spread the wealth around by paying artisans, workers, craftsmen, photographers, travel agents, hotels, restaurateurs, etc.

> Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market.

Wealth has a distribution in any economy, and the actual distribution is a consequence of the economic system which itself is the aggregate of specific policy decisions.

Those people could have been doing something more useful with their time if Bezos hadn't bought them. Because Bezos has such an obscene amount of wealth, he can outpay any other cause that people would want to pay for. Those craftsmen and workers could have built a farm and a school, but because the people that need those don't have the kind of money Bezos does, they used their time to entertain Bezos and his friends for a couple of days instead.

> Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market. People work and invest to get money in exchange.

It's trickled up by regulatory capture, cheating the political system, gerrymandering, and grants to ensure the property class pay little or no taxes and get socialism for the rich while suppressing wages, expanding undocumented workers and 13a exception prison slave labor, encouraging austerity, and neoliberalism.

This is comical. Do you fondle billionaires balls out of sheer loyalty or are you that ideologically captured? Trickle-down economics never worked, do you not know that? Nobody can work hard enough to deserve a billion dollars. This wealth was stolen from actual workers being way undercompensated.

Now, from a higher level of abstraction, would you rather $80M worth of work be done toward inflating balloons and setting tables for some megarich fuck's wedding? Or would you rather they be doing something that's actually improving society? (And maybe is more fulfilling to them).

> The Gilded Age was a time of great prosperity in the US.

No, wrong. Totally wrong. It was a time of immense inequality.

Oddly enough, these days are even worse than then in terms of income and wealth ratios, but different in absolute effects of penury.

> The Gilded Age was a time of great prosperity in the US.

Oh ok, so you have a totally wrong understanding of history. Neoliberalism's strongest solider, I see.

You do realize that the average American back then was working insanely long hours -when there was work at all- for meager wages, in horrendous conditions? Perhaps that's what you want to do with your life? Not me.

> remove all regulations on rent.

How would removing all regulations on rent improve this situation? You'd just make landlords even more powerful than they already are. What would prevent them from charging as much as they can get away with, ensuring their tenants remain poor forever? They are knowns to collectively price gouge.