> is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on pr

> is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on proximity to the transaction and the relationship seems exponential. That's why salespeople quite often make more than inventors, engineers, etc. and why the final commercializers of tech make orders of magnitude more than those that develop it (e.g. Zuckerberg vs. Tim Berners-Lee). The other factor is equity ownership and other forms of leverage. There's an old atheist joke: that we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists. A similar effect caused me to lose my faith in at least naive and right-leaning forms of libertarianism. I worked for a while in business consulting. The only thing that kept me from becoming a full-on socialist was then working for a while as a government contractor. Both business and government are sausage factories. You just don't want to know. In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. If there were quick easy sound-bite answers to these things, we would not be struggling with these same problems over and over again. They would be solved and we'd be walking around in some kind of sci-fi white toga world.