> That is almost entirely orthogonal to your claim that there are no truly democratic industrialized nations.

No, my original claim was that political self-interest isn't any nobler than economic self-interest. Your original claim was that "economic self-interest is fundamentally alienating", but there's very little evidence to back that up, and as I showed, there is ample evidence to the contrary.

> I have not made claims about economic freedom, but material wealth

This is your own quote:

"Sure, and time wise we can witness countless examples of economic freedom increasing and material wealth while happiness decreases. The data doesn't support your claim, almost every study done on the subject doesn't support your claims."

It is demonstrably incorrect.

> So is your equivocation of economic output and economic freedom.

I'm happy to play that game too. If economic freedom is an inadequate proxy, and your point appears to be that economic output doesn't correlate with happiness, then why is it that the nations with the highest GDP (PPP) per capita (modulo oil kingdoms) are also the happiest? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...

> The best example is the US, where economic output has grown but happiness and life-satisfaction has decreased.

The US is only one data-point. It's not "the best example", it's the "only example". Economic output has grown around the entire western (and increasingly East Asian[1]) world. Happiness and life-satisfaction has not decreased around the economically liberalized world, as I showed you in the numerous linked research. You're trying to extrapolate off of just one data point. In fact, to use this single data point as an example to make the case that economic self-interest is "fundamentally alienating", would be like me pointing to the USSR or Cuba or North Korea to make the case that political self-interest is "fundamentally alienating". It's simplistic and reductive, and ignores like 30 other dependent variables.

If you want to play the "let's cite the best single data point" game, then I can just as easily point to Switzerland, which is top 3 GDP per capita (economic output), top 3 economic freedom, top 3 median wealth per adult (material wealth), among the lowest taxes in the developed world, among the lowest government spending as a % of GDP among OECD countries, and yet is...top 5 by "happiness index".

Also, it's debatable if it even makes sense to consider the US one datapoint, because it's in reality a collection of 50 data points, since each State has its own socioeconomic policies, and happiness levels. You'll find that there's considerable variance in happiness among the States: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings, and a large handful of States are among the happiest in the world.

The US is also an odd data-point to cite, because the size of its government has been increasing over time, not decreasing. Inflation adjusted federal spending is the highest it's ever been, and federal receipts as a percentage of GDP have been basically flat since WW2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

In just about every way, it's not the best mascot for your case.

> From these premises I draw the conclusion that we should only pursue material wealth insofar as it actually benefits our well-being, and that government involvement in the economy can be good as long as the government is actually following the will of the people and that it is the best way to do so.

But this is tautological. Nobody actually disagrees with this, that's not where the contention lies.

The contention is 1) whether "government involvement in the economy" necessarily follows the "will of the people" and 2) whether economic incentives do not. The debate is that government involvement does not always do that, especially given a heterogenous polity where you can pit factions against each other. A similar debate is that economic incentives not only do not ignore the will of the people, the two are often positively correlated, because you need to make consumers happy to win their business. There are obviously exceptions to both the former and the latter, but on average, the world's societies have largely converged around systems that maximize economic self-interest and only incorporating political self-interest insofar as economic self-interest yields sub-optimal outcomes, and in fact using political self-interest to channel economic self-interest in socially optimal ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_model_of_capitalism