Any time people engage in some elaborate exercise and it arrives at: "me and people like me should be powerful and not pay taxes and stuff" the reason for makin

Any time people engage in some elaborate exercise and it arrives at: "me and people like me should be powerful and not pay taxes and stuff" the reason for making the argument is not a noble one, the argument probably has a bunch of tricks and falsehoods in it, and there's never really any way to extract anything useful, greed and grandiosity are both fundamentally contaminative processes. These folks have a bunch of money because we allowed them to privatize the commons of 20th century R&D mostly funded by the DoD and done at places like Bell Labs, Thiel and others saw that their interests had become aligned with more traditional arch-Randian goons, and they've captured the levers of power damn near up to the presidency. This has quite predictably led to a real mess that's getting worse by the day, the economic outlook is bleak, wars are breaking out or intensifying left right and center, and all of this traces a very clear lineage back to allowing a small group of people privatize a bunch of public good. It was a disaster when it happened in Russia in the 90s and its a disaster now.