This was a reply, but devolved into a dump of my current thoughts on economics. As I'm no economist it is likely muddled, naive, nonsense.
The UK newspapers regularly have articles about the increased use of food banks. I haven't looked into it at all so can't comment on details such as how much is genuine need versus playing the game, or the rate of increase, etc. Combined with wage deflation or stagnation, food inflation from devalued currency counteracts the expected low prices of low-scarcity. It seems that given how much people dick around with the systems, a low-scarcity economy is a theoretical concept, too simplistic to exist in a complex environment, buffeted by politicians, economists, bankers, etc. I have no economics education, so I'm likely talking rubbish, please correct.
On the matter of capitalism, I've come to the conclusion that it is fundamentally corrupt. The entire thing is a capital feedback loop. Not in the self-regulating sense ascribed to free markets. The more capital you have, the more capital you are able to accrue. And capital is power. The old saying, the rich get richer, is not just the superficial, flippant comment it might appear, flung around in the pub - it describes a core characteristic of capitalism. The amassing of capital does enable progress with big projects, but at the cost of having a system with a blatant foundational design flaw. People talk about bubbles as if they're a flaw in the system, but they're not - they're a characteristic of capitalism, which would be better named bubblism. I'm not commenting on whether capitalism is good or bad, or the pros and cons, rather I guess I'm surprised at all the discussion of the peripheral issues, but not of the foundational design, syntax instead of architecture. I'm not suggesting there's a better alternative, again, just surprised that it seems, from my layperson point of view, that there are so many people doing so much around the elephant in the room. It's standing there dumping over and over, and people clean the floor, spray the air freshener, but never touch the elephant. Yes, there are people in favour of other systems - they've come up with little. Distilling capitalism to this feedback clumping flaw, and I consider such exponential imbalance in a deliberate system to be a flaw, is it really so difficult to design a foundation that avoids that? Tax is a response to the flawed system, it doesn't address the design of the system.
Edit: I always read some comments before I read the article, to see if the article is worth reading, which is fine, but I should probably read the article before I start commenting!