> It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.
I see the old "[technological] man's burden" is as magnanimous as ever. ;)
Why is the rest of the world desperately poor? It's absurd to imagine that it's because the free enterprise West wants to help that 90%, but is held back by... anti-growth activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality colonialism (aka stealing from that 90%) never ended, it just got better PR and privatization.
> Redistribution only comes through bloodshed.
Agreed, and most of the wealth redistribution in the world today is upward (as 'the rich getting richer' implies). Since we're having the consequent bloodshed anyway, why not redistribute wealth in the other direction to maximize hedonic good?
Warren Buffett put it best: "There's class warfare all right, but it's my class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."
> At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.
...implying[1] technology doesn't cause bloodshed. Talk about a skewed perspective!
Just to arbitrarily pick a (hardly unique) example, what do Amazonian tribespeople think of technology? What have their experiences been? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/uncontacted-trib...
Why was that gold suddenly economical to prospect/mine? Technology.
How were these people massacred so efficiently? Technology.
Why was there such an enormous power imbalance between these two populations? Technology.
"Technology" may look fine-and-dandy to the person behind the keyboard (especially for those who personify it by unconsciously imagining that 'technology' pays their salary), but never forget that all our technological artifacts were ripped out of the ground at some point, typically after using third-world government corruption to steal the land from its former inhabitants. We're merely rich enough that we can push that devastation "far, far away."
[1] or perhaps I'm misinterpreting, and you're just saying that technology brings hard work in addition to bloodshed?
