We used to have no minimum wage and child labour laws, no obligatory education, no welfare - we already know how it looks, just read a history book. You think you’re a Libertarian of sorts no doubt, but you’re unknowingly just advocating Feudalism, which it would turn into very quickly. Do Americans even get taught European history prior to their country’s hostile takeover? The most actually free countries in the world are third world shitholes, the experiments have already been done and still continue today - learn about Pinochet’s recent presidency as a good example - there’s very good reason why we don’t go for Tea Party nonsense in more developed parts of the world, where the best performing nations are actually more Social Democratic with welfare systems - fact.
If things were still like how you want them to become again, unless you have noble ancestry and statistically I’m willing to guess you don’t, you’d be working the fields or some modern equivalent as a serf and living in a shanty town, walking through streets glazed in human waste, dying early from easily treatable diseases like in the third world. Then you can work as hard as you like! After all, if you didn’t, you’d not provide enough for your vassals (essentially the military) and have enough left over to feed yourself and your family, which will be larger due to lack of education and to make up for all the premature deaths. Those in power in the West say North Korea, which resembles this, is Communist - it’s actually more Feudalist if people actually cared to learn the actual definitions of each term.
We’ve moved on, keep up! There’s a reason your position is anti-popular, particularly by the educated, who for some obviously conspiratorial reason tend to be left wing . It must be because they have no life experience (unlike the minority of right wingers also in education and the many left wingers who have experienced the world of work for many years, right?) and not because they actually know things!
The educated left even read about attempts at achieving Socialism as a gateway to Communism and all the difficulties in orchestrating such a revolution (the same difficulties with all the same violence that has always occurred throughout history when significant socio-economic change was attempted e.g. the hostile acquisition of America to install its notion of Classical Liberalism). As such we know the difference between something run by the people, and some top-down dictatorship that called itself “Communism” - I already explained and you sympathised with how progressive things are appropriated by the opposition to mean their opposite. We know it wasn’t actually Communism because we know what Communism actually is compared to that which it was named after, which failed horribly because it was actually Totalitarianism.
I’ve already explained the rationale behind what you’re still calling “taking cuts and pieces from the successful”. Necessarily, for every winner there is a loser - that’s fine. Let me repeat, let there be inequality and reward for the productive, but for God’s sake let there be controls to curtail the degree to which winners can absolutely dominate the losers. The unplanned market demonstrably can’t do it itself without its inbuilt, inevitable, periodic and catastrophic market crashes bringing the whole system back into the 3rd world, which they would without the unappreciated government safety nets that we enjoy (and suffer) today, just to re-level the playing field to an extent. In order to keep but also control inequality such that we can maintain some semblance of social mobility and utilisation of talent that would otherwise be lost to lack of opportunity, there needs to be redistribution - aka a wage expense to not only direct employees but also the rest of the economy for its indirect part in you acquiring all your riches as an employer - aka TAX.
Personal responsibility is inbuilt in my propositions here (even with application to capitalists! Crazy) - it is still very much required, you are not alone in its advocation. My point about the biology of behaviour is not to be overlooked however, it’s not as simple as just saying “take responsibility”, it’s pre-determined that many won’t just because of biology. You can’t avoid that, even if you were to arrange things such that they literally died out like in non-human species. Nature’s crap-shoot for excellence inevitably results in losers as well as winners, except we have the ability to allow them to live out a life of minimal dignity, we only need to choose to do so (the left) or not (the right).
Maybe I’ve not properly explained, but the pool of unemployment plays a necessary role in the economy. 1) There’s those who will never be fit for useful economic participation, the disabled, the elderly, infants etc. - we need to pay for them to stay out if anything. 2) There’s those who can be educated to be useful, we need to pay for that if they can’t themselves (teacher salaries need to be high enough to justify how difficult they can be, burnout is particularly high for such an essential job), and 3) there’s those who are able and willing to work but can’t get anything yet - this maintains a level of competitive strain for people to keep their job and work hard at it to justify their employment over someone who is after their job. The second category cannot be overlooked in case there is talent that would otherwise be lost, and I’m not in favour of the third - I don’t think fear is the optimal incentive to work, but this is the valuable role unemployment currently plays for our economy and it’s in our own interests to pay for it. It even helps stem inflation: see the Phillips curve.
But there’s also the overstated category of 4) “able but not willing”, which everybody likes to focus on. In reality, this group is going to exist: there will exist people willing to sacrifice their dignity, social status and their position on the ladder of sexual desirability (moreso with males) just to not have to work. On one hand you just have to accept that due to the importance of the first 3 categories, the 4th will exist as an unfortunate side effect and that’s just tough, because it can only be managed to a very limited extent without oppressive measures that spill over and negatively affect other parties too. On the other hand I’m absolutely in favour of personal freedom, including the freedom to not work - cue the incoming hate towards my position here. Admit this though: not all valuable productivity has its place within paid work - there is a lot of creativity that could go on here but can’t because the necessity to enter into paid work is so high. And yes, I support the right to live with minimal dignity despite being out of work and sacrificing social and sexual status like I said, I’m sorry. They are a minority and this is cheap to fund, just let them be. On the whole though, the unemployed are very very much worth their pay.
Finally, robots! Technological creativity is replacing human necessity in the workplace, it’s actually increasingly cheaper and better to not pay us to work, to even pay us to not work when a machine can. Back to my aversion to the third category, the further justification is here: if there wasn’t the pressure to accept a bum deal to perform unskilled work that this category is all after just to get a foot in the door, it would be more economical for employers to invest in machinery to do the job instead of having to pay higher wages just to reignite the incentive for this category to still try.
Again, pay the unemployed to not search for work if they don’t have something skilled to offer, pay for machinery to do it instead.
This is going to happen anyway - eventually to skilled work too.
Technology is encroaching more and more, the pool of unemployed will only grow as a result, particularly once a certain threshold is hit.
What will you rightists do then? Deny them welfare and let them suffer and starve just to prove a point about responsibility? Do you have an ounce of civility? Soon it will affect you types too, and what then? Will you then be in favour of welfare or suicide?
Accept reality. Leftism is necessarily the future because of this, any perceived rise in its popularity is only the beginning of an adjustment to the coming reality, whether or not such a rise is actually happening at all. The future is happening though.
I’ve stolen the following from someone young advocates of the right seem to worship at the moment: Jordan Peterson. He speaks of iterative trading games coming to adopt a pareto distribution where the median and modal wealth quickly approaches literally zero, and the end result is all the wealth ending up in the hands of 1 person - just like a game of monopoly. This has been simulated even where the outcomes of the trades are random, and the same result happens. Our current inequality would have happened even if it was all just luck - and due to determinism in my opinion all skill and ability actually is entirely luck: you don’t choose your initial conditions, and every subsequent decision to change these conditions or otherwise is necessarily the result of your luck in these initial conditions. That’s all it is. Rightists need to get off their high horse and respect the realities of nature, your philosophies are all just manifestations of the fundamental attribution error.
If you’ve not yet read and appreciated my position @Inconvenient Reality, then do read and appreciate the above. These are far better arguments than I see being presented by other leftists here (and most other places I’ve come across too). They can be very wishy-washy, but the above should all be abundantly clear, logical and very real.