Some people have nothing interesting or valuable to say, they just always talk about race. Somehow everything becomes about race, even things which have nothing to do with race.
You can definitely do bad things to earn money. But a doctor, an engineer, etc, would've already contributed to the common good even if they buy a tenth car that sits in their garage. So simply buying a tenth car that sits in your garage (and employs the people building the car) isn't in itself a bad thing or an indication that you're not contributing to the common good.
In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that. It's a strange expectation to impose on others this notion of "spending only on the common good." It's not black and white what the common good is, and that is why an educated free market is a good proxy or mechanism for figuring that out.
With the insane property taxes the left wants to levy on personal dwellings, you never really own anything anyway. It's not a problem with just the elites - it's a problem with the leftists pretending to be on the side of the worker but then implementing 2% to 4% yearly property tax bills. See: Illinois.
The problem with reddit is that you get downvoted simply for going against the hivemind, even if you supply evidence that you are right. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation on the more popular subreddits, especially on politics.
Note that as savings pile up in banks and brokerages, they supply the world with more loans for starting new businesses or new ventures. The money in a bank doesn't just sit there. It is a basis for economic activity throughout the country and even the rest of the world.
A more appropriate example is not an island that constrains population, but a population where new people are born and make investments into new businesses and new ideas. You can certainly have people transition more towards savings over time as they enter their prime career earning potential, without it impacting the rest. This is because there will always be other people who are willing to start businesses.
The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet.
So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.
Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.
"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17
On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.
Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
You are very confused. A mortgage is definitely a cost. It's only meaningful equity if you ever sell it and get any of the money back, which is not guaranteed at all.
And only public housing would collapse the entire economy. Plenty of countries tried this, most notably the commies in Russia and in eastern Europe.
It's almost as if it hasn't even been 50 years since people were last dying because of the evil extremist ideologies from the 1900s! Tens of millions dead in the last hundred years.
Because communism is inherently a violent and paranoid ideology. It's blatantly obvious even in the foundational literature from Marx. Marx openly advocated violence and threatened violence against anyone who was opposed to the proletariat.
Not only that, but he construed a framework in which anything opposing the proletariat, including "class antagonisms" that could be literally anything, should be opposed with force or the threat of force. Things like religion, private property, or anything that is not for the revolution is necessarily considered against the revolution.
When the foundation of a worldview is steeped in violence and using violence to get your political way, it's no surprise that the implementation of that worldview results in bloodshed and power vacuums.
Deep analysis of the body for any visible signs of tumors or diseases. Stroke detection software. Home and car entry without needing to carry any keys. Much faster entry into airports, where we need passports or security checks anyway. Lots of entertainment possibilities.
But evolution does have a direction. Survival of the fittest! Those animals most fit to reproduce survive and reproduce. Humans have done that and taken over every other species with tools and general intelligence that no other animal can hope to possess. We are what you would call the apex predator on earth.
5G will probably bring in another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation. Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I'm especially interested in how this might enable low-cost high-quality telemedicine.
Or we could, you know, just go to school and work and interact with one another the way we already do. Rather than trying to force people to give up years of their short lives via a draft.