Why does it always have to be one extreme or the other? Why can't inequality be curbed, instead of getting worse, without nightmares of "everybody being made the same", or Stalinist Russia? I've been in situations where everybody shared, it wasn't scary at all.
Because Communism is bad mmmkay? Remember what happened to Russia? Remember what they forced McCarthy to do to our own people? /s
The gray scale between political extremes is really so often ignored that it is almost scary. The real issue comes down to concentration of power in one subsection of the population. Be it a communist/facist/what have you dictator, plutocracy, or even entrenched political elite backed by corporate lobbying.
"The real issue comes down to concentration of power in one subsection of the population."
Yeah... that sounds really good in conversation. But let's pick it apart.
Any political system is going to concentrate power because otherwise any act will require buy-in by vast numbers of people. Imagine a committee of 300 million and you'll see why democracy delegates power.
The problem then is more that these groups are the wrong people (selected badly) or that there's not a clear communication to them as to what they should be doing. I'd say both of these are huge problems in our society.
"Everybody sharing" is one thing. I already give the bulk of my paycheck (which already has nearly half my income confiscated before I see it) to 3 other no-income people. "Curb income inequality" doesn't recognize the sharing already occurring, but instead promises to put a gun to my head if I don't "share" more, which I do indeed find very scary.
Before taking from "the rich" while on this income-redistribution crusade, find out how many others they're already supporting, by contract or charity or responsibility.
> "Curb income inequality" doesn't recognize the sharing already occurring, but instead promises to put a gun to my head
Even not riding a train without a ticket is ultimately enforced with a gun pointed to someone's head, as is paying taxes.
I'd be in favour of taxation that works like air friction does, the faster you move, the more friction increases, reaching a hard limit at some point. Instead of the opposite, the super rich and corporations effectively buying loopholes.
Corruption/bribery is always a problem in politics. The US Constitution was written to grant the government limited powers; over time, explicit limits have been worn down to corrupt plain meaning of key terms ("interstate commerce", "general welfare", etc) and normalize the very perversion they were intended to prevent.
The ultimate solution to such problems remains intact: vote. Lobbying and voter persuasion is quite effective, so vote out those who create/preserve such loopholes and vote in those who close them. For all the whining consternation people exude about such problems, very few actually direct that energy toward meaningful solutions; the super rich and corporations have learned to direct such energy and exploit it accordingly.
Wait, I tought we were talking about what we would think would be a desirable state of things -- how to achieve that is an entirely different subject.
Not that I disagree with that part, though of course one problem is what a politician promises before election, and what they do afterwards, is often not correlated at all.
The simple answer is that political systems aren't as varied as you might think. There's egalitarianism, which is either unsubsidized (libertarian) or subsidized (socialism). Then there's those who think that some order should come before the individual, and those are either royalist, paleoconservative, "social conservative" or some form of meso-conservative (incl. neoconservatives).
But, as you might guess, there's a catch. Any political system picks up inertia like a ball rolling downhill. Thus whatever direction you go in, you keep going in... and so unsubsidized egalitarianism usually becomes subsidized (as in the 1960s in USA and Europe) and moderate conservatism eventually gets more conservative as it did under Reagan. The reason for this is that, believe it or not, political systems aim at visions of society. The more power they get, the closer they get toward realizing that vision, which is actually what the people who believe in them want.
Conservatives and liberals, by the way, have radically different visions for what they want out of society:
