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Take Musk. He got rich from selling Paypal. Had he spent the money on charity as this post suggests (or demands) we would have had no Tesla and no SpaceX. I th
by flexie 10y ago
Take Musk. He got rich from selling Paypal. Had he spent the money on charity as this post suggests (or demands) we would have had no Tesla and no SpaceX.
I think the world is often be better off by rich people doing more of what made them rich in the first place.
- krapp 10y agoThe world doesn't need, nor will most of it benefit from, either Tesla or SpaceX.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoSpaceX is life support for the capitalist cancer of exponential growth, so I agree with you there. On the other hand, electric vehicles are going to be necessary for a sustainable future.
- krapp 10y agoSure, but we don't really need Tesla to give us electric cars. Every auto manufacturer is going to be doing that soon enough.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoMaybe that just means that current charities need to be disrupted. Part of the problem is most charities throw money at symptoms rather than addressing the root causes.
- Y_Y 10y agoThe root of an awful lot of the problems charities try to address is that people are poor. They aren't poor because of Elon Musk, but there's a good argument to be made that if it weren't for capitalism (now, not historically) we could have developed nations where there were no poor.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoI don't think capitalism itself is the problem. Capitalism is basically just a policy of individual freedom extended to control of production, which honestly is hard to argue with. The main problem in my mind is that as a culture we've bought into the mistaken notion that more goods and services mean more happiness. Of course, this notion is primarily the result of the capitalist propaganda machine we call advertising. If we restricted advertising it would do a lot to tame the beast. Another problem is that we've walled everything off, so if you want to live you need to play the capitalist game. People should be able to opt out if they want. That being said, while I'm mostly pro-capitalism, I'm also in favor of income redistribution. Happiness from wealth has hardcore diminishing returns, and visible inequality directly creates unhappiness. Based on these facts, significant income redistribution is really a moral imperative.