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Have you considered that this type of thinking may be a contributing factor to the increasing political instability we’re seeing?
No one wants to be told “sorry, you’re actually unimportant and nothing can ever change because… taps sign The Economy”.
Eventually, there will be people who start saying “fuck your economy”.
The type of thinking where we dispassionately try to predict the secondary effects of an event, or the type of thinking where we curse at dispassionate analysis? I'm going to blame the latter.
I recently debunked this nonsense meme for a friend when it made the rounds again on Facebook. Although he in particular is actually a caring and compassionate person who immediately understood and accepted the correction, I haven't been getting that vibe from most of the "blame the Kulaks" types in the same misinformation ecosystem. I'd bet that if you divided the country into people who think falsehoods are more dangerous than envy vs those who think envy is more dangerous than falsehoods, Spergistan would be stable and prosperous (despite an increasing Gini coefficient) whereas Equalia would end up with poor peasants being killed by even poorer peasants for saving "too much" seed corn.
Personally, I can also see dispassionate utilitarian arguments for our level of or even a higher level of economic redistribution, but "we can afford to tax and redistribute trillions of dollars a year because ... taps sign The Economy" still ends up resting on the foundation of The Economy, not because I said so, but because the reality of total production needing to balance total consumption says so.
Of course there will. This shit didn't kill people by the tens of millions last century because of a weird virus that made everyone's minds go temporarily haywire, it did so because our minds' permanent "we all need to share and what are incentives anyway" instinct made sense for a 150-man tribe in the pre-agricultural pre-industrial world where our ancestors evolved. If the Chieftain has more fruit than he can ever eat, it's not because he planted an orchard, it's because he's an ass who took too much from the gatherers after their trip to the wild fruit trees. That kind of thinking doesn't even apply in a world where fruit comes from agriculture, much less to a world whose richest men obviously weren't merely hoarding the output of wild operating-system trees and wild electric-car trees, but nobody ever spells it out explicitly, they just let the same instincts run wild.
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United Health is downstream of people politically demanding healthcare that covers everything and that they don't have to pay much for. And the ability to do that even as much as United Health does is downstream of having a decent economy. Where will the "fuck your economy" people be when they can't get employers to pay for their health care, because they're unemployed?
Talking about the issues with "maximizing shareholder value" and capitalism and all that with the health insurance industry is ridiculous. It's one of the most regulated industries around.
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