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>>Who's doing that? Read this thread over again. There is a sad sentiment regarding Elon Musk's Mansion. >>Governments can allocate capital more effectively t
by kamaal 11y ago
>>Who's doing that?
Read this thread over again. There is a sad sentiment regarding Elon Musk's Mansion.
>>Governments can allocate capital more effectively than most billionaires.
Demonstrably wrong. See wars in history.
>>Inequality itself causes social problems.
Like what? Your USSR, North Koreas, Venezuelas of the world. In fact every failed communist nation in the past century falsifies this claim.
>>No single person can really be so much more productive than others as to justify billions in wealth; so if someone is that wealthy, they got that way on account of others' work, so they don't deserve it. Economists are saying we need to reduce inequality to avoid disaster.
Appreciable sentiment if you till the land with a shovel in your hand. Increase of productivity is not always measured through human effort alone. But also through tools which humans invent to amplify their productivity through automation of some kind. There are kinds of effort, one where you do all the work alone. One where you work to invent a tool that does that the job for you. Latter is also commonly known as 'progress'.
- gjm11 11y agoI don't see the "sad sentiment regarding Elon Musk's mansion" anywhere at all in this discussion. Someone said Musk seemed like the kind of person who would put every cent he owned into his businesses and not buy a big house or a yacht or anything. Someone else said: no, as it happens he's got a big house. No one has suggested that he shouldn't have a big house. No one has suggested that having one makes him a bad person. I think you're seeing things that aren't there. On the rest: I wonder whether you misunderstood what I was doing in that paragraph. I am not endorsing any of the arguments I mentioned (though as it happens I agree with some of them). I was listing all the things that people in this discussion had (at the time) said in favour of higher taxes, and pointing out that none of them involved saying that wealth is evil or that rich people are evil. So responding by countering a few of the arguments misses the point. I wasn't making those arguments myself. I was pointing out that none of them involves the idea that rich = evil.