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I see the wealthy person as someone who is clever and disciplined. The government is neither clever nor disciplined. I believe letting the billionaire keep his

I see the wealthy person as someone who is clever and disciplined. The government is neither clever nor disciplined. I believe letting the billionaire keep his or her money is more likely to increase world utility. Elon and Bezos send people to space with the wealth they fairly gained. The government prints trillions of dollars every year to fund their deficits and wars. If the government needs another billion dollars, it’s quite easy for them to create it. Why seize money from the rare person who is talented enough to make so much of it?

pmoriarty 7y ago
Let's say some incredibly talented person "fairly" comes to own all the water in the world. All the rest of us would depend on this person to live, and he/she could choose which of us lives or dies simply by not selling us any water. Would you want to live in such a world? Or do you think maybe the rest of us deserve to have some of that water, even if we're not as clever and we didn't "fairly" earn it? Dialing back to the real world, all these billionaires and other elites are having very real outsize impacts on the lives of the less wealthy -- from whether/where/how they work, to how they and their children get educated, to what information we have access to, to who goes to jail and who goes free, who goes to war and against whom, and who lives or dies. Incredible wealth gives people incredible power, and the concentration of this incredible power in the hands of a small minority is distorting the world in ways those not in this minority are having trouble swallowing, no matter whether this concentration of wealth and power was "fairly" arrived at or not.
- bluecalm 7y ago
  If you are concerned about that focus on anti monopoly laws not taxes. If one person owns all the water so you prefer a solution that forces them to give % of income derived from it to others or do you prefer a solution that prevents them from owning all the water?
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    Anti-monopoly laws are not enough (even if we ignore the problems of regulatory capture). If all the water was owned by three people instead of one person, or even by five people, or a thousand, there'd still be the other seven billion of us which would die of thirst if these thousand commanded. But, yes, giving up some of what they own is one way of dealing with it... though one could argue that by the time they have control of all that water or wealth, it's too late, because by then they have so much power that they, not you, get to call the shots. Another way is to change the system so that they don't gain so much control in the first place, and so that water (or wealth) is distributed more equitably among all seven billion of us instead of just a tiny few.
TFYS 7y ago
The government sent people to space decades ago. Elon and Bezos would be nowhere near sending people to space without the work government has done. The government spends trillions on wars exactly because of the power concentration you are defending. It's not the common man that decides to go to war, it's the network of wealthy people who benefit from it.

pmoriarty 7y ago

Let's say some incredibly talented person "fairly" comes to own all the water in the world. All the rest of us would depend on this person to live, and he/she could choose which of us lives or dies simply by not selling us any water. Would you want to live in such a world? Or do you think maybe the rest of us deserve to have some of that water, even if we're not as clever and we didn't "fairly" earn it? Dialing back to the real world, all these billionaires and other elites are having very real outsize impacts on the lives of the less wealthy -- from whether/where/how they work, to how they and their children get educated, to what information we have access to, to who goes to jail and who goes free, who goes to war and against whom, and who lives or dies. Incredible wealth gives people incredible power, and the concentration of this incredible power in the hands of a small minority is distorting the world in ways those not in this minority are having trouble swallowing, no matter whether this concentration of wealth and power was "fairly" arrived at or not.

bluecalm 7y ago
If you are concerned about that focus on anti monopoly laws not taxes. If one person owns all the water so you prefer a solution that forces them to give % of income derived from it to others or do you prefer a solution that prevents them from owning all the water?
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  Anti-monopoly laws are not enough (even if we ignore the problems of regulatory capture). If all the water was owned by three people instead of one person, or even by five people, or a thousand, there'd still be the other seven billion of us which would die of thirst if these thousand commanded. But, yes, giving up some of what they own is one way of dealing with it... though one could argue that by the time they have control of all that water or wealth, it's too late, because by then they have so much power that they, not you, get to call the shots. Another way is to change the system so that they don't gain so much control in the first place, and so that water (or wealth) is distributed more equitably among all seven billion of us instead of just a tiny few.

TFYS 7y ago

The government sent people to space decades ago. Elon and Bezos would be nowhere near sending people to space without the work government has done. The government spends trillions on wars exactly because of the power concentration you are defending. It's not the common man that decides to go to war, it's the network of wealthy people who benefit from it.