4 ms·

I don't think there's a threshhold. Take Bill Gates for example. He's done a lot of good in his life. He built a huge company that transformed personal computin

by cjlars 9y ago

I don't think there's a threshhold. Take Bill Gates for example. He's done a lot of good in his life. He built a huge company that transformed personal computing, employed an army of people and then put billions of dollars into poverty mediation programs that the world's governments didn't seem to be able to handle. Along the way, he also payed billions in taxes. Without old Bill, the world is many billions of dollars poorer. I think there's a lot of value in letting people that are 10,000x better than the average person at creating wealth do so. Maybe there should be something to limit the excesses of luxurious consumption (I for one, favor a progressive VAT), but I think trying to impose punitively high tax rates on very successful people makes society worse off in most cases.

crimsonalucard 9y ago
Bill did not build a company alone. He built it off the backs of employees. His earnings are so substantial that it is fundamentally impossible for him to earn it off of his own two hands and intelligence alone. No one man has enough intelligence or physical ability to generate a billion dollars. Can one man create the windows operating system? Can one man construct a boeing 747? If no one man can construct a boeing 747 than how can their exist people who have wealth greater than the worth of a passenger airliner? There is only one explanation. This wealth was earned unfairly. What Bill and all other billionaires do is utilize the labor of other people. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are all group efforts where humanity pools their collective power together to construct something greater than one man can produce. The issue here is that, the leaders of these groups get rewards that are disproportionate. There is no way one human can contribute labor worth 50 billion dollars to the world. It it physically impossible. The taxes that Bill paid is wealth generated by the employees, not Bill.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > There is only one explanation. This wealth was earned unfairly. Define "unfairly". If by "unfairly", you mean "earned by owning a company that paid its employees well, gave them stock options that made millionaires out of many of them, and still made the owner insanely rich", well, that's kind of an odd definition of "unfairly".
  - Retra 9y ago
    Are you aware of the concept of loaded language?
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    This is hard to define and is subjective. I use a hard metric for my own definition that makes sense. Find a physical product that is fundamentally impossible to be built by one man. Say a boeing 747. Find a man who has more wealth then the cost of a boeing 747. By common sense: if it is impossible for a man to build a 747 with his bare hands then it is impossible for a man to own more wealth then the cost of a 747 without going through trades and transactions that are unfair. If such a man exists then he attained his wealth through unfair transactions. This is my definition of unfair. You may have another definition and I respect that. IMO in the ideal world Bill Gates probably deserves to be a millionaire and billionaires would represent a perversion of wealth that is insanely obscene.
    - cjlars 9y ago
      >if it is impossible for a man to build a 747 with his bare hands & >without going through trades and transactions that are unfair It's fundamentally impossible for one man to build even the microwave that preheats the meals inside a 747, but that's no reasonable threshold. The entirety of modern life is built on transacting goods and services that are fundamentally impossible to create alone -- are you trying to say that all transactions are unfair? Or just Bill Gates'? Or just transactions that are too skillfully done?
      - crimsonalucard 9y ago
        This is not true at all. A microwave can be built by the knowledge and skills of a single man. Additionally you are not thinking holistically. Take your computer: a device that needs the manpower of thousands to create. Such a device is only as cheap as it is because of mass production on an automated factory line. The true value thus cannot be measured by an individual computer but by the intrinsic value of the technology as a whole. This is hard to measure. I chose a 747 because 747s are not produced on a robotic factory line. They are built by machinists, so each plane is a more accurate measure of a products' true value. I am saying that in a capitalist economy. The majority of transactions are unfair. The lower class gets screwed perpetually. This is a fact of life.
- slededit 9y ago
  Bill was able to organize the labor of people into something more productive than the sum of its parts. That is a relatively rare skill. Luck comes into it, and we can debate how much of a factor time, place, family networks, etc played into it. But regardless there were incumbents that were much more likely to succeed than him at the start. IBM had the biggest advantage here. Snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory is one of the largest blunders in modern business. Gary Kildall failed to land a suitable deal with IBM, and would have been the next in line to be Bill Gates. Even if he did make the deal his personality made it unlikely he'd structure the deal as BillG did which enabled the clone market. Or Seattle Computer Products that owned the actual DOS BillG used. Ultimately it was BillG that executed the vision and did so relentlessly for multiple decades. Not many other executives were sleeping under their desks at the time. This was particularly what impressed IBM enough to take a chance on them. Their work ethic as a company was well noted in the industry. BillG set that example from the top.
  - gertef 9y ago
    Bill G used a mixture of cuthroat and illegal activities to crush competition and create a monopoly. In his absence, we may well hve had a thriving ecosystem of compatible adn far more secure technology. Or some other cutthrouat like Steve Jobs would have won. Just because the game is winner-take-all doesn't mean the winner did nearly all the valuable work.
    - slededit 9y ago
      That was true in the 90s with netscape. Less so during the 80s when his position was being cemented. He even sent IBM over to Gary Kildall initially. It was only after that meeting failed that he went out and bought QDOS. The point is that Microsoft wasn't always a monopoly. It took skill to get there, and there were opponents that started with much better hands.
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    Is organizing labor a skill as rare as building a boeing 747 with your bare hands and raw intelligence? I would say that the aforementioned skill is so rare, no human being on the face of the earth has the ability to build an airliner by themselves. Yet here we have man named Bill Gates who possesses more wealth then several airliners. Bill Gates probably deserves to be a millionaire, but no man deservers to be billionaire... it's just obscene to say such a thing.

by cjlars 9y ago

crimsonalucard 9y ago

Bill did not build a company alone. He built it off the backs of employees. His earnings are so substantial that it is fundamentally impossible for him to earn it off of his own two hands and intelligence alone. No one man has enough intelligence or physical ability to generate a billion dollars. Can one man create the windows operating system? Can one man construct a boeing 747? If no one man can construct a boeing 747 than how can their exist people who have wealth greater than the worth of a passenger airliner? There is only one explanation. This wealth was earned unfairly. What Bill and all other billionaires do is utilize the labor of other people. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are all group efforts where humanity pools their collective power together to construct something greater than one man can produce. The issue here is that, the leaders of these groups get rewards that are disproportionate. There is no way one human can contribute labor worth 50 billion dollars to the world. It it physically impossible. The taxes that Bill paid is wealth generated by the employees, not Bill.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> There is only one explanation. This wealth was earned unfairly. Define "unfairly". If by "unfairly", you mean "earned by owning a company that paid its employees well, gave them stock options that made millionaires out of many of them, and still made the owner insanely rich", well, that's kind of an odd definition of "unfairly".
- Retra 9y ago
  Are you aware of the concept of loaded language?
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  This is hard to define and is subjective. I use a hard metric for my own definition that makes sense. Find a physical product that is fundamentally impossible to be built by one man. Say a boeing 747. Find a man who has more wealth then the cost of a boeing 747. By common sense: if it is impossible for a man to build a 747 with his bare hands then it is impossible for a man to own more wealth then the cost of a 747 without going through trades and transactions that are unfair. If such a man exists then he attained his wealth through unfair transactions. This is my definition of unfair. You may have another definition and I respect that. IMO in the ideal world Bill Gates probably deserves to be a millionaire and billionaires would represent a perversion of wealth that is insanely obscene.
  - cjlars 9y ago
    >if it is impossible for a man to build a 747 with his bare hands & >without going through trades and transactions that are unfair It's fundamentally impossible for one man to build even the microwave that preheats the meals inside a 747, but that's no reasonable threshold. The entirety of modern life is built on transacting goods and services that are fundamentally impossible to create alone -- are you trying to say that all transactions are unfair? Or just Bill Gates'? Or just transactions that are too skillfully done?
    - crimsonalucard 9y ago
      This is not true at all. A microwave can be built by the knowledge and skills of a single man. Additionally you are not thinking holistically. Take your computer: a device that needs the manpower of thousands to create. Such a device is only as cheap as it is because of mass production on an automated factory line. The true value thus cannot be measured by an individual computer but by the intrinsic value of the technology as a whole. This is hard to measure. I chose a 747 because 747s are not produced on a robotic factory line. They are built by machinists, so each plane is a more accurate measure of a products' true value. I am saying that in a capitalist economy. The majority of transactions are unfair. The lower class gets screwed perpetually. This is a fact of life.
slededit 9y ago
Bill was able to organize the labor of people into something more productive than the sum of its parts. That is a relatively rare skill. Luck comes into it, and we can debate how much of a factor time, place, family networks, etc played into it. But regardless there were incumbents that were much more likely to succeed than him at the start. IBM had the biggest advantage here. Snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory is one of the largest blunders in modern business. Gary Kildall failed to land a suitable deal with IBM, and would have been the next in line to be Bill Gates. Even if he did make the deal his personality made it unlikely he'd structure the deal as BillG did which enabled the clone market. Or Seattle Computer Products that owned the actual DOS BillG used. Ultimately it was BillG that executed the vision and did so relentlessly for multiple decades. Not many other executives were sleeping under their desks at the time. This was particularly what impressed IBM enough to take a chance on them. Their work ethic as a company was well noted in the industry. BillG set that example from the top.
- gertef 9y ago
  Bill G used a mixture of cuthroat and illegal activities to crush competition and create a monopoly. In his absence, we may well hve had a thriving ecosystem of compatible adn far more secure technology. Or some other cutthrouat like Steve Jobs would have won. Just because the game is winner-take-all doesn't mean the winner did nearly all the valuable work.
  - slededit 9y ago
    That was true in the 90s with netscape. Less so during the 80s when his position was being cemented. He even sent IBM over to Gary Kildall initially. It was only after that meeting failed that he went out and bought QDOS. The point is that Microsoft wasn't always a monopoly. It took skill to get there, and there were opponents that started with much better hands.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Is organizing labor a skill as rare as building a boeing 747 with your bare hands and raw intelligence? I would say that the aforementioned skill is so rare, no human being on the face of the earth has the ability to build an airliner by themselves. Yet here we have man named Bill Gates who possesses more wealth then several airliners. Bill Gates probably deserves to be a millionaire, but no man deservers to be billionaire... it's just obscene to say such a thing.