The occasional, feeble, rarely enforced speed bumps that we occasionally throw up around some largely performative ideal that working people shouldn’t just get constantly ripped off via structural advantage for self-styled job creators almost always lead to temporary increases in broad based prosperity as judged by honest and humane notions of the common good for Res Publica. A limited but meaningful subset of the population was seeing substantial increases in prosperity in the post war period of comparatively high taxation and comparatively high regulation. It sucks that we didn’t extend those benefits to minorities, that was a glaring flaw, but that was fixable without throwing the whole thing out and handing the reins over to Art Laffer and Milton Friedman and other goblins like that.
This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.
We’re now deep into a regression on this that has the typical person struggling via a combination of monopoly and monopsony pricing power enabled by blank check lobbyism that creates de facto indentured status for anyone with a kid who needs medication.
Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.