RE: Philosophy 101, #7: What is Meta-Utopia?
freedom requires not letting that envy lead to impositions on other people's lives and justly acquired possessions.
That's the tricky part.
The whole push for a $15.00 minimum wage in Washington State has led to an actual decrease in wages for the very people it was supposed to help because, surprise, employers cut back on their hours because they couldn't afford to pay it.
It doesn't help that our culture is centered around consumption and that people are constantly assaulted by advertising that they're somehow inferior if they don't have the latest iPhone or if their car is more than a year old, etc.
And on the opposite side of that you have people making fortunes shuffling paper or even just digitally "trading" numbers who don't actually produce anything. You can see that in the people who use bots here to milk the reward pool dry without producing any valuable content.
At least there is good content being created here.
Tricky it is, yes. And there is no easy solution. But it is not impossible either, and the key I believe is education. Like you say about the minimum wage; people push for it because they mistakenly believe that it is beneficial. With improved economic understanding, people can realise that minimum wage laws are a bad idea. Similarly, people can learn to understand that a market economy is not a zero-sum game, and they can learn to see the difference between those who acquired wealth by providing productive services for others (like entrepreneurs) and those who acquired wealth by extracting it from others by force or fraud (like politicians), and direct their natural feelings of envy and animosity only towards the latter group.
I agree 100%.