To me it ultimately boils down to fairness and having a sense of "being in this together". A very good example to me is the firefighter mentioned in the article

To me it ultimately boils down to fairness and having a sense of "being in this together". A very good example to me is the firefighter mentioned in the article, he probably does a much more productive job (saving lives) than someone like myself who might get lucky in playing the entrepreneurial / technologist bootstrapping game by striking it rich with some cost-reducing / profit-boosting tool-building. Alas, it's problematic to make these kind of comparisons though (you could argue some tool saves even more lifes, etc). The "smells" of extreme ideology.. In any case I still believe it's fair to try to spread the wealth more evenly as you and I couldn't even build stuff without the solid framework of society. I answered your question somewhat in another comment in this article's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628811