7 ms·
Why the hell is it even for sale?
by jquery 14y ago
Why the hell is it even for sale?
- _delirium 14y agoAlmost all the property on the island was acquired by Dole as a pineapple plantation back in Ye Olden Days when it was easy for Dole to do that sort of thing (1920s), and somehow the property has never gotten broken up in the decades since then, so Ellison just bought it from the til-now-current owner, who owns it via a chain of purchases from Dole and subsidiaries.
- jquery 14y agoThanks for the explanation. This is a vivid demonstration of wealth concentration writ large, maybe it will wake people up.
- todayiamme 14y ago...and why is that wrong? --- Meta Comment This isn't a post about any economic theory or about debating the morality of the fixed pie fallacy. It's about knee-jerk moralistic responses to complex phenomena. It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days. It goes against the spirit of this community (satisfying intellectual curiosity) because even though a knee jerk reaction has its place, it can't help you find the answers. It just muddies up the waters.
- afterburner 14y agoWealth concentration? The issue is that it turns out bad for the vast majority of people.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- derrida 14y agoI'll bite: efficient use of resources.
- michaelochurch 14y agoWe're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it. Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it. (For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.) There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.
- derrida 14y agoThe comment changed that I replied to. My view was wealth concentration == inefficient use of resources (on the whole, exceptions being self-made entrepreneurs)
- adventureful 14y agomichaelochurch: "We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it." Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes. Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.
- jquery 14y agoIf aversion to monarchy is knee-jerk then count me in. I will jerk my knees until no monarchs remain, tech billionaires included.
- nacker 14y agoMonarchy may be making a big comeback. And that's a GOOD thing. Try taking a break from jerking your knees and read "Democracy: The God that Failed", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe: MONARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE IDEA OF NATURAL ORDER From the vantage point of elementary economic theory and in light of historical evidence, then, a revisionist view of modern history results. The Whig theory of history, according to which mankind marches continually forward toward ever higher levels of progress, is incorrect. From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above short- sightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline. Nor does this verdict change if more or other indicators are included. Quite to the contrary. Without question the most important indicator of exploitation and present-orientedness not discussed above is war. Yet if this indicator were included the relative performance of democratic republican government appears to be even worse, not better. In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history. Long live King Larry of Lanai!
- excuse-me 14y agoSo you would get to rule America by simply being the idiot son of the previous ruler and with the help of family connections? Ridiculous
- nacker 14y agoThat knee jerk objection must have taken you all of two seconds to come up with! Like most interesting ideas, this one is NON-obvious. Try at least looking at the Amazon page for the book, or check out Lew Rockwell's enthusiastic endorsement of Hoppe's work, if you are part of the tl;dr crowd. It's FAR from ridiculous.
- davidw 14y ago> It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days. That's just what you get when you mix people of different ideologies and get them talking about economics/politics. That's why we try and avoid those topics.
- sp332 14y agoWealth concentration isn't inherently bad. In fact I'm sure Ellison will not abuse it dramatically.
- beedogs 14y ago/s ?
- sp332 14y agoNo, honestly. Do you think Ellison will mess with the 2,000 people living on the island?
- antidoh 14y agoIt could be bad. Wealth that moves through the economy tends to keep people employed. Now, take all the money that's being spent and therefore paying N people, and put it in a room. That's bad, I think.
- aiscott 14y agoThat never happens though. The only way for money to sit still is to literally pull it out in cash and stuff it under a mattress.
- jellicle 14y agoSure it is. If we have an economy of ten people, it is inherently bad for one person to control 100% of the wealth while 9 people starve to death. That is, in fact, inherently bad. To put it another way, we know that the marginal utility of wealth decreases as wealth increases. Therefore under the standard principle of greatest good for the greatest number, social good is maximized when wealth is evenly distributed.
- sp332 14y agoThe space race was an incredible concentration of wealth and it turned out many technical advances which improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis.
- scott_meade 14y agoPart of the "Big Five". 'The extent of the power that the Big Five had was considered by some as equivalent to an oligarchy." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_(Hawaii) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_(Hawaii)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sp332 14y agoAfter being "discovered" by Europeans, the island was used for ranching. Most of it was owned by one guy, Walter Gibson. Then James Dole (of Dole food company) turned the island into the world's largest pineapple plantation. Castle & Cooke acquired Dole, then changed their name to Dole, then spun off a new company called Castle & Cooke, which was bought by the CEO of Dole, David Murdoch. Murdoch just sold his 98% of the island to Ellison. Currently there is only one town on the island, population 2,000.
- evgen 14y agoThere are also two pretty nice resorts and a couple of golf courses. It is a weird ecology compared to the rest of Hawaii; Maui gets most of its rain so it is rather dry and has pine forests and a lot of deer.
- cromulent 14y agoJames Dole, cousin of Sanford Dole, who was the first President of Hawaii after the overthrow by the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingd...
- thematt 14y agoAlmost anything is for sale given enough money.
- excuse-me 14y agoAlthough it's odd to buy a state (Alaska excepted) I assume that's why Washington DC isn't a state?
- Turing_Machine 14y agoThe Louisiana Purchase is another example. Quite a number of states were bought in that deal. Washington DC isn't a state because it was decided that it would work best to have the national capital in a special non-state enclave, so as not to make any one state more important than the others.
- dredmorbius 14y agoWhy limit yourself to one state when you can buy 15, and two provinces? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase (And yes, the Louisiana Purchase, at 828,000 square miles, is larger than Alaska, at 663,268. Though the nominal price was higher -- $15 million vs. $7.2). Ellison was robbed blind.
- excuse-me 14y agoBut would you really want Louisiana ?
- yardie 14y agoThe Louisiana Purchase was a scam that went awry. Napoleon "sold it" so he could raise money for his European campaign. The plan was to sell it to the Americans then take it back through force after he successfully conquered Europe.
- benholmen 14y agoThat's an interesting statement. Do you have a citation for that so I can read more about it?