You make a lot of valid points and I’m not trying to argue against them, because they do apply to today’s world. My main concern though is:

But the more you have of something, the more its value goes down. This is supply and demand.

This is the foundation of modern economics, but remarkably it isn’t true. A carrot is always worth the value of a carrot. Maybe we assign it a monetary value based on scarcity, but I’m talking about the intrinsic value of stuff. We make more and more stuff every year, but the average US citizen is not seeing his or her wealth increase. The stuff is being hoarded in the hands of a select few, which is the end result of free market capitalism if it isn’t regulated to provide a fair playing field. This bothers progressives to no end, but I think libertarians rather enjoy that outcome.

I don’t think the two ideologies will ever find common ground, so I’ve been trying to look beyond all of this and find a path to a Star Trek economy. We’re approaching full automation within 1 or 2 decades, and the singularity no later than 3 or 4 (barring a global disaster or political interference). Already today the US has perhaps 2-3 times more stuff than it needs. More empty houses than homeless, for example. The cost of food is inverted, so that resource-intensive products like meat cost less than vegetables. Automobiles have an arbitrary value, depreciating 50% as they’re driven off a lot. We basically waste more than most of the rest of the planet earns. We can analyze the reasons behind this to no end, meanwhile 6 billion people are living a subsistence lifestyle that would be like slavery to us.

Anyway, I don’t see WinCo ever toppling Walmart. It has more to do with regulatory capture and monopoly than quality of service though. WinCo has a rather narrow niche and isn’t willing to do the strong-arming to have a presence in every city. They aren’t trying to maximize profits either. But I do think employee ownership is the next big thing. The costs to form a business are lower than ever, and the great failure of banks to provide seed capital has caused attention to turn to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We just don’t need bosses anymore, or venture capital for that matter, which means we don’t need investors or the burden of paying dividends.

But it worries me that all of this emphasis on self-actualization is promoting selfishness. The “I’ve got mine” mentality is reminiscent of the Michael Douglas Wall Street days and I find it distasteful. I don’t trust the majority of people who’ve made it to do the right thing and give something back to the community that got them there. So I prefer to leave it in the hands of the people and just vote for increased pay by raising taxes. We could double taxes tomorrow and pass a moratorium on government spending and raise everyone’s income by $10,000 ($3 trillion divided by 300 million citizens) as a basic income. In other words, most people would see an increase in income if taxes were raised. This is counterintuitive, but what happened from roughly 1940 to 1980. Unfortunately a basic income was not in the picture, so most of the wealth created was in the form of public works. Now those roads, bridges, dams etc are crumbling because we’ve slashed government spending to unsustainable levels.

I’ve heard all of the arguments about how if we give everyone more money, inflation goes up. That turns out to be one of the great fallacies of all time and an easy way to get people to vote against their own self-interest. I worked at a business that charged $99/hr and paid the employees $15/hr. Doubling everyone’s pay is more likely to mean taking $15 per employee out of the boss’s pocket than doubling prices. This appears to be true across the board in most industries today (wages as a percentage of business overhead are lower than ever), and is an impetus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Well, this has become completely political now and I’m probably just spinning my wheels here. Paul Krugman is probably as divisive as, say, Milton Friedman, so I would recommend to anyone reading this far to look at the writings of someone like Noam Chomsky as a litmus test. If we’re talking about the future, then it’s going to be more productive to think at a meta-level. There are very basic measures of unfairness and prosperity that even a child can understand, and I think he does a good job of exploring policy ramifications through reductionism. I don’t think either liberalism or conservatism are compatible with a post-scarcity future.