No, it's actually not unique at all. If you look at the history of any civilization - in its broadest sense, as the change of human society from hunter-gatherer tribes to fixed settlements to development of cities to the modern urbanized society - you'll see that "archetypical businessman" existed pretty much since forever. In fact, if you remember the story of Abraham - the one from the Bible, the first Jew - his father was a businessman, namely the idol trader. There was no word "businessman" back then, but the concept of trade - which necessitates the surplus (you need something to trade) and follows from it (you need to do something with that surplus) existed in the history of every civilization and is widely covered in virtually every historical work, of course. If anything, the idea that we could ignore all the civilization history and go back to hunter-gatherer subsistence model is something that would be "a pretty unique take". It sounds good when we're sitting in our comfortable chairs, with bellies well filled and our other needs taken care of, and wax fashionably nostalgic about "simpler times". But somehow most people moved away from this paradise as soon as they were able to. I wonder why?
David Graeber and David Wengrow would like a word with you regarding your simplistic, monotonic version of human history.
"The Dawn of Everything" covers, with multiple redundant stories, why this concept of "the way human civilizations evolved" is wrong. That doesn't mean that none of them did, but absilutely not all of them. It certainly wasn't a straight path from hunter-gatherer to <what came next> more or less anywhere in the world.
I never claimed it was a straight uniform path. I only claimed whatever path there was, the concept of production surplus likely played a role, and the concept of trade too - and the tradesmen, aka "businessmen" - were somewhere nearby to facilitate it.
By force of what? Alien invaders from space? Random natural phenomena? Or some other humans, who somehow became more powerful and numerous? How did they manage to achieve that and why they chose to achieve that, instead of staying in their own paradise?
Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income.
In a society where few people earned more than Nx the lowest (pick your own N), this distribution of tax origin would look very different.
Think of it a different way: suppose a government explicitly targets being able to spend 23% of GDP on government (i.e. publically) chosen goals. How does it collect 23% of GDP? Well, if everyone earned precisely the same, it would collect it equally from each person. On the other hand, if one person earned 99% of GDP and everyone else combined collectively earned the remaining 1%, then obviously the super rich person will be be paying almost all of the tax revenue themselves.
The current situation in the US is obviously not this extreme, but the thought experiment shows why it works the way it does.
Also important is the concept of marginal utility of income, which describes how each additional currency-unit of income becomes less and less significant as your total income grows.
In short, 10%-pay-80% reflects the other decisions that have been made about how the US economy works (or doesn't work), and don't have much to do with taxation in general, or the provision of public services.
> Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of income.
Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of productivity and value creation.
I've also lived under communism, where they ignored this uneven contribution and tried to squash the incomes uniformly. The result was quite predictable: we were equally starving, of course. Except the nomenklatura, but that's another story.
> Which is a reflection of an intensely unequal distribution of productivity and value creation.
Well, I can't disagree with that claim. But it's not really all that interesting, in and of itself. The question is: to what extent, and with sort of multiples, should differences in wealth/income reflect the distribution of productivity/value creation?
There are a wide range of answers to that question, all the way from pure commune-style uniformity to contemporary US "capitalism". The only thing that is abundantly clear is that neither of these extremes work all that well for the majority of the people who live under them.
The only one who can answer that question is the free market. And while not satisfying for everybody, it certainly is the best answer we found so far while trying various forms of organisations with this humankind of ours.
The best answer in that not only was the only one that got us fed unlike the alternatives that only brought suffering, death and starvation but also got us such an amazing wealth that we have the luxury to sit and debate such issues from opposite corners of the earth, in real time, on magic devices connected to the freaking cloud.
As an Eastern European, I lived through the transition from the horrors of communism to the benefits of capitalism and while it wasn't easy I am a living testament to the immense success story this change brought to these lands.
And you can also plainly see the reverse transformation from wealth to misery brought by switching away from free markets in countries such as Argentina or Venezuela.
Who's "we" in the "best answer we found so far" statement?
Ignoring for a fact that having magic devices that do some esoteric operation isn't a useful measurement of any kind of 'wealth' (as if having the privilege to own an iPhone while working 10 hour mind-numbing days at an amazon warehouse is 'luxury'), you do realize that the fact you're posting here when most of the world under the free market lives in abject subsistence poverty speaks to the fact that our system only works when we're able to parasitically suck wealth, resources and labour from less powerful countries.
Also, somehow doubt those pensioners and others in the 1990's who lived through the former USSR's transition to "the free market" were really enjoying their new found freedoms as life expectancy, wages and quality of live plummeted except for a handful of the very same nomenklatura in charge before becoming even more insanely privileged than before.
The 'free market' in this conception is just letting the 'nomenklatura' types of people be even more insanely wealthy than everyone else because now they have even less guardrails preventing them from exploiting and manipulating everyone around them for self-enrichment.
"those pensioners and others in the 1990" were enjoying the fact that they could finally buy bread and other foodstuff in the store. And have medicine in hospitals. And the fact that they could talk to one another without wondering who is a secret service collaborator.
I mean those who stayed in the country, because an amazing number were enjoying their new found freedom of simply going to a capitalist country to try and improve their lot in life. Funny how none of them western exploited were in any hurry to go and enjoy the communism wonders. The walls and bullets at the border were all to keep us "lucky" communists in!
And you haven't seen abject poverty and dehumanization until you've visited a communist orphanage...
> The only one who can answer that question is the free market. And while not satisfying for everybody, it certainly is the best answer we found so far while trying various forms of organisations with this humankind of ours.
I do not agree with you.
First of all because "the free market" is so vague as to be capable of encompassing a huge variety of economic arrangements with wildly different outcomes. Secondly because it absolutely was not "the only one that got us fed" - any sufficiently long read of history will make that clear. Thirdly, because it is far from clear what the role of the ill-defined "free market" has been in the development of magic devices connected to the freaking cloud. Involved? Probably? Responsible? I'd say probably not.
But it's fine, I'm not trying to convince you. We just don't see the world in the same way.
Also, setting up the only other alternative to an uncontrolled free market as being Soviet communism to begin with is incredibly ignorant and naive.
I'm sure this same scenario played out during aztec human sacrifices. Someone asks "do we really need to do all these human sacrifices to ensure a good harvest?" and the other responds "well, maybe not, and its not satisfying for everybody, but its probably the best answer we found so far. Do you want to live off bugs in the jungle? That's your only other choice, sorry"
If you found a better system, by all means - propose it here. But usually when leftists say that they just mean some form of watered down communism and completely skip over stuff like Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's blood baths bringing up Aztecs instead...
