The Jetsons and Politics

Possibly the biggest fundamental issue dividing people politically is the question of if and how much the government should redistribute the wealth that a free market creates/allocates. On one side, you hear many people claim that redistribution is just fundamentally wrong, and a pure free market will always work best overall. On the other side, you hear many people claim that there's a fundamental right to things like health insurance, retirement, a "living wage", etc. Neither side makes sense to me, and thinking about the world of the Jetsons (and its opposite) is a good way to explain why.

First, what are the pros and cons of different sides of the redistribution scale, regardless of where you think the optimal point is?

I think most people will agree on 2 main problems with doing too much redistribution.  There's the moral problem where it just feels wrong to take too much money from those who have made it. And there's the economic problem, where it makes everyone poorer by reducing incentives to work and leaving less money for long-term investments in technology and such.

Similarly, there's 2 main reasons why people get uncomfortable with too little redistribution. Morally, we want to minimize human suffering, and some amount of redistribution does that. And economically, social safety nets can encourage risk-taking, and other services such as public education enables the potential of those who wouldn't be able to afford to do so otherwise.

Now imagine a future where technology has advanced to the point where we live like the Jetsons. Robots do everything for us that we could ever need or want. There would be no jobs other than making and maintaining those robots, and we'd only need maybe 1% of the population to do that. This would be a really weird society to be a hard-core conservative. With no redistribution, everyone would be at the mercy of the all-powerful 1% that makes/maintains the robots. It's pretty clear that in a situation like that, we might as well be mostly socialist and let everyone enjoy the things that we can easily afford to universally provide.

On the other hand, if you go far back in time, or if we have some sort of apocalyptic event that takes away all our technology, it'd be very different. If we have no real health care, what does it mean to say that health insurance is a human right? If we have hardly any technology, such that we all have to work extremely hard and struggle just to survive, it's not possible to ensure food/shelter/water for those who get too sick/disabled/old to work. And it wouldn't make sense to have unemployment insurance; you can easily find a job because there's so much that needs to be done. In that kind of society, it wouldn't make sense to be a liberal. For society to continue, we would need those who are able to produce the most to flourish. And any programs to take from the better-off to help the worse-off would be taking away money that may be spent on the technological progress that would end up benefiting everyone in the future.

Neither of those two extremes may ever happen to us. But thinking about the extremes makes it clear that there's not one right answer on redistribution that can apply to all possible scenarios. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, it makes sense for government redistribution to grow as (if?) our technology and economy grows.