World political struggles - Dimka Daily 2019.02.19

World political struggles

In countries where people use democratic or at least semi-democratic means to determine political and economic changes there are two main sides: one side is usually leans more toward helping "everyone", while the other to letting markets regulate most of the things.
The main idea of the libertarians and most other western economists is that government sucks at almost everything, and too much regulation stiffens the economy. In other words, most things should be left to free market forces.
So if that is done right the amount of earned money will correlate to effort put into the system.
It's a good idea, with fairness in mind, but naturally it works very differently. Even when all the laws are fair rich and powerful will tent to earn more and more, the the poor will earn less and less. To such degree that the "fair" 45º slope will turn to a drastic "L" shape, with super-super rich will be making all the money and the rest 99.99% will be barely surviving. On top of that it's never all very fair, the system gets corrupt, exaggerating the benefits of the richest and most powerful elite, thus running to "L" shape distribution even faster. That was pretty much the standard since the dawn of the civilization till the fairly recent revolutions. Basically it leads to bloody revolts. So some social safety net was put in place. It's natural for people to help the struggling ones, and some welfare give good economic results. Then came communists and socialists. Their idea of the distribution is very different. Every one should get enough, so taking money from very rich and giving to the very poor considered normal and practical. But that horrible removed the incentives to work hard and as the result pretty much all socialist countries did not do well economically.
Modern West is afraid of Socialism, yet influenced by it dramatically. And with often two party political system we see the struggle as following. Once side tries to help poor a lot, the other side tries to oppose it.