Right, so an argument from pathos rather than logos. Prepare to be dismissed by those who can just as easily and authentically say they equally don’t care about your concerns - but like you said, you don’t care. Communication breakdown.
Personally though, I would prefer a solution that actually worked in reality and didn’t make everything worse, which requires reason. Jumping the gun due to an emotional response - no matter how justified - could just as easily ruin everything.
A sane definition of a good economy might be one that maximises contributions from as many people as possible, including both parents of families of any size (potentially even their kids and retirees too), in order to supply all their respective needs to an even greater extent, utilising all the types and degrees of talent available for the provision of the best possible goods and services. This individualism disintegrates the biological family entirely except by coincidence, or arguably it expands the concept of family to encompass the entire economy. Whether or not you prefer this vision is arbitrary, personally I wouldn’t prefer it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily insane.
And as long as we can keep on top of it and continue to innovate our way around such problems, our species will persist. The vast majority of species that have ever existed are already extinct, and newer ones are being discovered all the time. Natural selection is topping up everything we’re losing.
And the other side of the same coin is that immigration allows access to new perspectives and non-local talent that can be combined with local talent in order to achieve better results than we could from the utilisation of just local talent.
And of course, the lower the wages, the more employees can be hired and/or the products or services can be sold cheaper. Thus you don’t need as large a wage in order to afford the same stuff you always bought before.
Honestly, I think the immigration argument is rubbish.
You’d be surprised what you can take as an employee: if you’ve ever been one of the remaining employees after punishing numbers of redundancies are imposed on the workforce of the company you still work for - as I have - you might assume it’s all over and your new challenges insurmountable - as I did - yet somehow find yourself still above water. This is especially so if you’re desperate to keep your job as some source of guaranteed income as opposed to risking an unknown period of none.
This is what I am in favour of: a living wage for all those not in work so they aren’t forced to accept a low wage out of fear of being given even less in benefits or nothing at all to live on. The problem is how to fund this as, for one, it’s probably far more expensive than you might guess, and if too many opt for it instead of working, there are less opportunities to tax everyone to fund it and the provision of currently expected levels of goods and services may decline with less people employed to offer them. This would require even higher welfare to afford what you were previously used to, which may now have inflated in price as well as what you’re used to is now more rare with less competition, and with demand for it much higher - the resulting spiral here ought to be clear to see.
However, tax always happens at the point that money changes hands, and the money is still in the economy so the taxation could surely just be restructured to extract the same levels of government income. As to what this money corresponds to in real wealth terms, it’s debatable that productivity would actually decrease if people had a viable option not to work. Apparently experiments with universal basic income have worked out pretty well - I think if anything, the types of things offered in the market might change, but the basics and the amount of business would be sustained.
Unfortunately you might have a great deal of home owners and landlords not wanting their property to drop in value to much less than they paid to buy it. They’ve already contributed to the problem by resisting further housing being built near theirs as it might reduce the value of their property if it’s unsightly as low cost housing is usually seen to be. And without the incentive that your property will increase in value, less houses will be privately built anyway. Those who fund the building of a house will have to offer builders much less or it will have cost them much more to fund the building of the house than to sell it, making it even less appealing to get into construction leaving fewer people to actually do the building. Also, the fact that most people can’t afford to own a property and are forced to rent gives them much more freedom to move house - it’s a lot easier.
But honestly I do despise the disproportionately high cost of living, it’s not like renting arrangements or other alternatives couldn’t be made if houses were cheaper to buy like they used to be not even that long ago. Socially funded housing is fine by me, but again, there is the problem of increasing tax revenues to afford it.
That’s what government is supposed to be for, in theory. If those in charge become too oppressive and conditions imposed by them too harsh, those near the top are supposed to overthrow and replace them - this is what happens to smaller extents in socially developed species naturally, and historically it has happened plenty of times with humans to much larger extents. The problem is that things have to get much much worse than they currently are to motivate such a revolution. If people aren’t literally starving they tend not to be motivated to such extremes that they will resort to drastic action. Our government is meant to represent our collective wishes and provide a greater power over our capitalist masters as a mechanism to overthrow them to the kinds of scales we see today. But in practice, they are paid for by the masters so…
Decentralised then. Granted that there is nothing free about any system in a deterministic universe where everything is determined to do what it does by prior things since long before you even existed. Further, everything you do effects everyone else at least minimally and indirectly. And even a weaker definition of freedom has a dual nature: one man’s freedom in a finite space is another man’s restriction as you say. The super rich even intentionally buy several houses in an area just to live in the most secluded one for more privacy. They’re free to do that, but nobody else is free to live in or even enter the grounds of these unused houses.
Absolutely disagree. We need to be creative to get around this seemingly naturally emerging inequality that is just going to grow until only one person has all the wealth. I agree that the environment is an issue, but its destruction is only really a natural consequence of free “decentralised” markets. The problem is that the ideology, based around self-interest, has enough people competing on equal enough grounds so as to mutually keep everyone else in check. But with growing inequality, this Classical Liberal ideal just gets further and further out of wack and the environment and the poor pay for it.