adamlarsson78

Either you are naive or disingenious. "Great for subsistence seekers" is a dog whistle for a neoliberal political agenda.

Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.

That is not at all controversial.

It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.

These two are highly correlated. My background is lower middle class, but high income for a few years made me into high wealth. With lower income tax, that would have been even more extreme. But with the high income tax I'm paying, lots of benefits go to low income families and make it less likely that their kids end up poor when they will be adults.

A proper taxation of inheritance would make income and wealth even stronger correlated, but that's hard to do as long as you can take your extreme wealth abroad. Family dynasties do exist even here and it's still an issue society needs to solve.

Sure, as long as we can agree that the original statement is, that's fine by me.

EU is great for subsistence seekers

The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule. That's just propaganda and a narrative spun by the rich to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Not backed by any data.

It may be frustrating, but that's the flipside of wealth inequality being much lower in Scandinavia and thereby society being more equal. Which makes it much more pleasant to live in, even for relatively rich people.

(Disclosure: I'm one of those relatively rich people in Scandinavia and I pay lots of taxes but I also enjoy that wealth inequality isn't so extreme over here.)

I don't want to be crude, but the sustainable approach is accepting that a company won't grow every year for forever

No necessarily. An economy can be sustainable even if all companies grow all the time. You just need to allow that companies fold now and then and close down. Then the market place opens space for remaining or new companies to grow. This is not just fantasy, it's how you keep cleaning up. (It does not imply that the economy as a whole keeps growing. That's a different matter altogether.)

Nature works like this too, by the way. Go to tour nearest forest, all plants keep growing as long as they are alive. But they have a limited lifetime and are broken down once they die. Which allows new ones to flurish (and grow).