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> but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society. That doesn't invalid

> but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society. That doesn't invalidate anything I said and it doesn't support what you were saying very well at all. Hitmen, heroin dealers and elephant poachers provide value to some people as well, but to say we should encourage those things simply because they provided 'value' is sociopathic.

manigandham 8y ago
I think you lost track of your own thread. Those things you mentioned are illegal. Nobody is saying you should do illegal things. But wealth generation is tied to value creation, and your stance seems to be that all wealth generation is from criminal means when that's clearly not true in the slightest. What else is there to say here?
- ionised 8y ago
  > I think you lost track of your own thread. No, I didn't. You're just struggling to comprehend what I'm saying because in your free-market fundamentalist world view, companies are benign entities of wealth creation and nothing more. I believe many of the things these companies do should be illegal. Many of them already are, they are just not fined/punished appropriately for them. It just becomes absorbed as a cost of doing business. Lot of what Google, Amazon, Facebook Uber, Microsoft, Intel etc. have done to stay on top has been illegal but the fines pathetic. Other stuff should have bene illegal and people are slowly coming round to the fact. They all even colluded on keeping wages low, remember? Of course you can expand out beyond tech as well. Enron fraud, HSBC drug-money laundering, DeBeers atificially limiting the supply of diamonds, Nestle claiming water is not a human right and fucking over Africans with their milk formula. I could honestly sit here all day and reel off instances legal violation after ethical violation after outright greed and exploitation from companies all over the world. But it's too late now. Even making these things illegal now doesn't strip the companies of the wealth they accrued beforehand. They are entrenched, because the system encourages this with pitiful consequences. I'm not naive enough to belive legal == moral and illegal == immoral. A lot of laws are lobbied by the entrenched to cement their own positions.

manigandham 8y ago

I think you lost track of your own thread. Those things you mentioned are illegal. Nobody is saying you should do illegal things. But wealth generation is tied to value creation, and your stance seems to be that all wealth generation is from criminal means when that's clearly not true in the slightest. What else is there to say here?

ionised 8y ago
> I think you lost track of your own thread. No, I didn't. You're just struggling to comprehend what I'm saying because in your free-market fundamentalist world view, companies are benign entities of wealth creation and nothing more. I believe many of the things these companies do should be illegal. Many of them already are, they are just not fined/punished appropriately for them. It just becomes absorbed as a cost of doing business. Lot of what Google, Amazon, Facebook Uber, Microsoft, Intel etc. have done to stay on top has been illegal but the fines pathetic. Other stuff should have bene illegal and people are slowly coming round to the fact. They all even colluded on keeping wages low, remember? Of course you can expand out beyond tech as well. Enron fraud, HSBC drug-money laundering, DeBeers atificially limiting the supply of diamonds, Nestle claiming water is not a human right and fucking over Africans with their milk formula. I could honestly sit here all day and reel off instances legal violation after ethical violation after outright greed and exploitation from companies all over the world. But it's too late now. Even making these things illegal now doesn't strip the companies of the wealth they accrued beforehand. They are entrenched, because the system encourages this with pitiful consequences. I'm not naive enough to belive legal == moral and illegal == immoral. A lot of laws are lobbied by the entrenched to cement their own positions.