Donuel:
/soapbox ON
All social inventions entail income redistribution, which is short hand for modulating the topography of wealth across demographics. You have to, if course, give due consideration to how income gets made in the first place, which leads you to the broader issue of how wealth gets created. In any complex society, the ingredients are raw resources (energy, water, minerals, ingredients, etc.), social inventions, and technology.

These three spheres are interdependent and a crisis in one can precipitate a crisis in the other two. The bedrock of civilization is water, energy and viable social frameworks in which to bring about technology. The relative success of the United States in building a prosperous, mobile, innovative nation came from the core asserts -- lots of natural resources, and the kind of basic social engineering (the Bill of Rights and the Constitution) that supported initiative and innovation.

Extremism is toxic to social inventions. That includes extremism of greed, whether exercised by power-centers of commerce, government, or dynasties. The normal benefit of leadership and innovation (the reasonable reward of successful risk-taking) turns into a more hideous distortion, abuse of power and offenses against the commons.

Because we are migrating away from the nationalist model into a global, flatter-earth age, due to the acceleration of transport, communication, information exchange and populations, we are encountering a whole new array of lumps and bumps in the "optimum blend" of freedoms, resources, social stability and exchange which makes the picture look more confusing as regions lose or gain various market shares. THe commons is re-defined and the old bridges get strained or collapse, putting traditional social inventions (for example, "households" and "tribes") at risk asnd bringing in new, unproven, and sometimes dodgy ones ("international corporations", "contractors", "holding companies").

But the fundamentals are the same throughout.

It seems to me, briefly, if these intersecting domains were better understood, the flaws in various offensive schemes would become more obvious and the reasons why they are flaws more easily understood.

/soapbox OFF

A