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What a ridiculous thing to post. Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the

What a ridiculous thing to post. Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. Many are former KGB who leveraged their political positions to profit off the chaos and rise of the greatest KGB opportunist of all-time: Putin. These are the exact sort of people you should be attacking if you at all believe in a free-market and capitalist meritocracy.

Gormo 13y ago
> Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. The article is pretty terse, and doesn't go into detail on how anyone in particular acquired their wealth. It doesn't enumerate the particular 110 people and attempt to sort the ones who acquired their wealth via illegitimate methods from those who didn't. It simply implies that there was some unified pool of wealth owned by an abstract aggregation called "Russia", and these 110 people have claimed tremendously disproportionate shares of this wealth, without any substantive evidence being offered that this is what actually happened. Sure, perhaps the Soviet state controlled most of the wealth within its territory while it existed, but the Soviet state acquired control of that wealth by simply seizing it from its previous owners; can we be absolutely sure that none of those 110 were simply using the corrupt institutions of the subsequent Russian state to reclaim wealth that was properly theirs in the first place? I'm not making any apologies for the Russian government here; it's entirely possible and quite probable that many people in Russia do indeed manipulate a corrupt political system in order to capture other people's wealth for themselves. What I'm criticizing here is the article, which presumes, without arguing the case, that people owning large amounts of wealth is somehow itself evidence that abuse has occurred, and which implies through its wording that wealth originates, initially unowned, in some kind of aggregation.

Gormo 13y ago

> Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. The article is pretty terse, and doesn't go into detail on how anyone in particular acquired their wealth. It doesn't enumerate the particular 110 people and attempt to sort the ones who acquired their wealth via illegitimate methods from those who didn't. It simply implies that there was some unified pool of wealth owned by an abstract aggregation called "Russia", and these 110 people have claimed tremendously disproportionate shares of this wealth, without any substantive evidence being offered that this is what actually happened. Sure, perhaps the Soviet state controlled most of the wealth within its territory while it existed, but the Soviet state acquired control of that wealth by simply seizing it from its previous owners; can we be absolutely sure that none of those 110 were simply using the corrupt institutions of the subsequent Russian state to reclaim wealth that was properly theirs in the first place? I'm not making any apologies for the Russian government here; it's entirely possible and quite probable that many people in Russia do indeed manipulate a corrupt political system in order to capture other people's wealth for themselves. What I'm criticizing here is the article, which presumes, without arguing the case, that people owning large amounts of wealth is somehow itself evidence that abuse has occurred, and which implies through its wording that wealth originates, initially unowned, in some kind of aggregation.