> Its not in any one businesses self interest to be philanthropic by paying their workers more or slashing their prices to drive up the available consumption of

> Its not in any one businesses self interest to be philanthropic by paying their workers more or slashing their prices to drive up the available consumption of the working class. Tragedy of the commons, I suppose. All large business want a slice of consumer spending, but if they don't support consumers, there is no consumer spending to capture. > Eventually the thread is drawn taught enough that bread stops showing up in the stores and nobody knows where it went because all the bread companies stopped manufacturing because the marginal returns from the poor by feeding them didn't justify the capital expenditure over playing books and offshoring profits. I hope things don't get that bad. I'm all for the idea of motivating people with money. Some inequality is a good thing. But too much inequality is a disservice to everybody: widespread food instability in the country with the highest number of guns per capita would be a national security crisis that even the wealthy could not ignore. I hope we act with some foresight. We have plenty of distance between here and that point. But I do wonder what level of inequality this country will sustain before things become slightly more egalitarian.