alt Hacker News> I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel [general societal benefits] out.
While I agree that the factors you cited are drags on the economy, I think historical evidence suggests strongly that they do not cancel out net benefit to society in general. The fact that poor people today benefit from refrigeration, air conditioning, electronic computers, vaccinations, safe anesthesia, cancer drugs, dialysis, HDTVs, cell phones, and a host of other things that the wealthiest people of yesteryear could not have purchased with all their wealth, suggests that the net trend of the economy has been to produce benefits for all of society, including regular people.
> you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)?
No, that is the opposite of my original claim. My claim, put simply, is that a low capital gains tax shifts the economy's output away from luxuries and toward meeting the needs of regular people.
> I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game?
But resource allocation is a zero-sum game. In any given year, there are only so many productively employable atoms and human hours. If less of those resources are being used to produce luxuries for wealthy people, they can be employed to produce goods and services for regular people.
Very interesting perspective. Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy (I would need to prove this, and in recent years the distribution of wealth has increased towards the wealthy), then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
This might not result in problems, as historically the increases in resource production have increased regular people's resource allocation in absolute terms, but I see no necessity in this trend. I might argue that the poor can lose resource allocation in the zero-sum game, but I'd need to prove that (something like, inflation hurts poor people more than the rich? incomplete thoughts). I could also argue that currents trends place financial assets (intangible) above production assets (tangible), slowing the benefit to regular people.
I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.