Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, am

Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, amounts to quite little. For instance, the Iraq War cost around $2 trillion. [1] Take the complete wealth of the richest 25 Americans [2] and you still couldn't even come close to funding that one conflict. And it's not like Iraq was an outlier. This happens repeatedly, and endlessly. The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...