>>Again and again you make the same assumptions without having any evidence supporting these claims. If we compare the growth curves of the US and Europe, the growth rates look very much the same, despite having very different labor laws and union strengths [1].
Your graph confirms what I stated: the growth rate since 2010 has sharply diverged. After the EU finished enjoying the growth benefits of integrating newly freed former-Easter-Bloc countries, the harmful effects of being more centralized through regulatory regimentation and social welfare forced redistribution became more apparent.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that unions and the free-market-suppressing laws they advocate are harmful to economic growth. This is broadly accepted by economists, as politically incorrect as it may be.
More centralization, via higher levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP, is strongly correlated with lower rates of economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
>>Buffet and his millionaire friends have already explained how they and their friends are cheating. Buffet hat a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. Has had for years.
Buffett is wrong. The top 1% have a much higher effective tax rate than the typical secretary.
>>The practical limits of growth will kick in much earlier than the physical limits. Ever diminishing returns will necessarily reduce growth; when there's not even a path, a street will greatly improve productivity. Once you have a road, a better road will only do so much. You can see that kind of growth slowdown in any developed economy. The Asian tigers are following the same curve as the US and Europe; continuously accelerated growth is impossible.
Your assumption that we are approaching some technological limit of growth is unsubstantiated:
1. Growth has accelerated every century for the past five centuries.
2. The slowdown in growth in the advanced economies corresponded with a massive rise in social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP, and expansion of regulatory regimentation of the economy, and these are perfectly capable of explaining that slowdown, without resorting to any unfounded theories that there is technological limits set an inherent ceiling on growth.
Let's explore some of these:
In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today, it's over 30 percent. In 1950, the Code of Federal Regulations was a tiny fraction of the size it is today, with no EPA or OSHA hounding companies every year.
[Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it](https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...)
In 1950, healthcare wasn't centralized and heavily bureaucratized due to the all-encompassing regulations left-leaning anti-libertarians have imposed since then:
[Expert Forum: The rise (and rise) of the healthcare administrator](https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...)
>Here's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period.
Healthcare is now controlled by mega-coorporations who are able to pay the huge fixed fees attached with complying with healthcare regulations.
And then there are the enormous public sector unions, who get all of their income from taxpayers, and massively contribute to the Democratic Party to ensure they keep getting more tax dollars:
At $140,000 Per Year, Why Are Government Workers In California Paid Twice As Much As Private Sector Workers?
https://hoover.org/research/california-state-government-work...
>In 2019, California state government workers earned an average of $143,000 per year, while local government employees earned nearly as much, averaging about $131,000 annually. But California’s private sector workers earned about $71,000, roughly half as much as their public sector counterparts. These figures include base pay, as well as overtime, and the value of non-wage benefits, such as employer pension/retirement contributions, health care, and paid days off.
>
>For over fifty years, public sector and private sector compensation rates were very similar, rising from roughly $17,000 in 1929 to about $45,000 in the early 1980s (both values are measured using 2008 dollars). But after the early 1980s, compensation rates began to diverge, with public sector pay rising much faster than that in the private sector over the last forty years.
And most importantly of all, left-leaning politicians in the 1950s hadn't locked down the housing markets in the most important metropolitan regions in the US:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
The massive increase in regulations on housing since the 1950s explains most of the rise in income inequality since 1950. Most inequality seems to stem from housing scarcity driving up housing costs (see Figure 3):
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
3. Your argument is similar to that made in the mid 19th century:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
The subsequent century saw economic growth rates in advanced countries accelerate, thus proving Mill wrong. If it weren't for the massive increase in social welfarism and free-market-suppressing regulatory regimentation, there's no reason to assume economic growth in advanced countries wouldn't have accelerated over the last few decades.
There are numerous emerging technologies that could massively increase productivity over the coming decades, like robotics, the space industry, nanotechnology, AI, public blockchains, etc. There is absolutely no reason to believe we are anywhere near the technological limits of productivity, or in an era of inherently diminishing returns on investment.
>>So what is is now? GDP has doubled, despite the oppressive socialist union laws? I'm certain you realize that something doesn't quite add up with your argument, right?
Nominal GDP doesn't capture everything of course, but comparing nominal GDP growth between the US and Europe can give us some indication as to which policies are better for economic development, and the US far surpassing the EU in nominal GDP growth suggests that the EU's comparatively greater economic centralization around government is harmful to growth.
>>Meanwhile minimal wage has not been increased for 14 years.
The minimum wage price control is not a measure of prosperity. The minimum wage price control should be zero, and I encourage you to study Economics to see why it, and all other price controls, should be abolished.