The comment you linked fails to substantially address the article you claim to critique. You basically quoted him once on a rather controversial point and said

The comment you linked fails to substantially address the article you claim to critique. You basically quoted him once on a rather controversial point and said "I disagree with this quip!". This particular sentence is hilarious: > if you have any serious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques of capitalism, wealth and power It seems like you're calling Paul Graham a pseudo-intellectual not because he's posturing, but because you disagree with him. You don't address any of the actual claims in the article, but you do call them "silly". Here's the problem with your response to that one quote you took out of context: >"The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption? We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." >Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power. It's a matter of degree. Many countries which rank low on various measures of corruption are nonetheless capitalist (New Zealand, Sweden, etc). Many countries which are socialist nonetheless suffer nepotism of the form Graham described in his previous example (Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc). Sure, it's a "small off-hand point", but it's the only part of your comment which isn't simply an insult without any backing. >One's ability to make money - to have one's skills suit the market; or to be lucky - has nothing to do with the value of your opinions or how frequently/prominently they should be offered to the rest of us. This is not related to the essay you had claimed to respond to. It apparently represents drawback of inequality, but it is left up to the reader to magically grasp your intuition that this drawback exceeds the benefits Paul Graham claims may be derived by rewarding those who are successful in business endeavors. One way to phrase this comment in a mature, reasonable way would be the following: "I think that the lacuna between the abilities of rich and poor to communicate to a large audience makes the level of inequality Graham advocates in society unacceptable." I might respond as follows: since people can only consume a finite amount of information, there will always be a situation where only a tiny minority have the ability to broadcast their views effectively. It is not clear to anyone how to identify in an objective manner who is most deserving of a wide audience, and so no society which has attempted to restrict this has ever succeeded in improving the quality of media reporting (but please provide examples!). In fact, essentially all societies which replace "communication by the rich" with "communication by the community-endowed-communicators" have even less reliable media than capitalist countries, consider e.g. Pravda. Thus your claim about inequality does not really provide much basis for an alternative, nor is it a problem specific to monetary inequality per se. >None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. Actually, a great deal of the essay Inequality and Risk focuses on the motivations of entrepreneurs, which, considering that he has worked with dozens of them, one would expect him to be in a uniquely important position to address. He usually does a pretty good job sticking to what he does know in this and many other essays. I downvoted you. In this and your subsequent comments you show little willingness to contribute to the discussion in any but a superficial way, and you provide little substantial argument or evidence to back up your repeated insults. Since you have been commenting on this thread (we can see your timestamps) for over an hour, one would expect it to be worth your time to write a comment that is worth reading.