This is blatant capitalist propaganda. Basic access to things like housing and education make for a tangibly wealthier society. Every dollar we invest in preschool education, for example, nets out $6 in terms of return throughout the course of the child's life.[1]
The nation continues on its "high variance" trajectory because it is structurally incapable of acting democratically. Two of the four major deliberative bodies are anti-democratic. The Senate is elected in extreme disproportion and the Supreme Court is ridiculous 9 unelected seniors deciding outcomes for an entire country.
It was set up this way intentionally, to entrench and structurally favor wealthy Southern slaveholders and established Northern merchants that traded on their commodities.
Of course you can't argue with the substance of my point. All it goes to show is how willing you are to write off half a million dead Americans for continued profits and power. Power to do what, exactly?
It's not just the communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba, even capitalist countries with newly minted leftist leadership like South Korea, have weathered this crisis with orders of magnitude less loss.
The systems for rending economic value from the value of human life are deeply entrenched here. Always have been[1]. That we can divorce the success of firms from the success of the people providing the value on the ground doing the work is a testament to it.
It doesn't make us awesome, it makes us abhorrent. The people that you claim "soar" are not randomly distributed, they are frequently born into favorable economic situations that allow them to develop the talents that make them super rich. In our lifetimes those islands of stability have degraded entirely in the service of ensuring the super rich can get even richer.
The nation continues on its "high variance" trajectory because it is structurally incapable of acting democratically. Two of the four major deliberative bodies are anti-democratic. The Senate is elected in extreme disproportion and the Supreme Court is ridiculous 9 unelected seniors deciding outcomes for an entire country.
It was set up this way intentionally, to entrench and structurally favor wealthy Southern slaveholders and established Northern merchants that traded on their commodities.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/12/504867570/how-inv...