You’re talking down to this person (far too much, IMO; just make your arguments or don’t, and to the extent that you’re unwilling to engage, don’t fill the gap with status games), while also failing to demonstrate that you’ve taken critiques of free market capitalism at all seriously.
OK. Say the average founder can capture 10% of the value he creates. That’s a preposterously high amount, but we’ll use it to make the math easier. This means that once he creates $100M of value there is no reason for him to use his various gifts to create more. Any additional value he creates will get him a reputation of obscenity, and he’ll be ritually stripped of his portion of it by a spiteful populace. Why would anyone do that? I would make sure to keep my contributions to humanity very small and local, only benefiting myself and my community at most, so that I wouldn’t be in danger of helping too many people and becoming obscene.
The idea that wealth earned in a capitalist economy reliably represents ‘value created’, in the sense we actually care about, is one of the main points of contention here! It’s something to be argued for, not taken as an axiom and used to dismiss their concerns as if they’re stupid.
Ok, thank you for the feedback. I feel I was at least no more out of line than “if they can’t get by on 10M boo hoo I don’t know what to tell them,” but I’ll try to adjust a bit away from talking down going forward.
But the dogma that there is no way to create enough value to become a billionaire honorably is exactly what I’m fighting against, so someone who takes the opposite as an axiom needs to be talked down from that point first.
You’re talking down to this person (far too much, IMO; just make your arguments or don’t, and to the extent that you’re unwilling to engage, don’t fill the gap with status games), while also failing to demonstrate that you’ve taken critiques of free market capitalism at all seriously.
The idea that wealth earned in a capitalist economy reliably represents ‘value created’, in the sense we actually care about, is one of the main points of contention here! It’s something to be argued for, not taken as an axiom and used to dismiss their concerns as if they’re stupid.
Ok, thank you for the feedback. I feel I was at least no more out of line than “if they can’t get by on 10M boo hoo I don’t know what to tell them,” but I’ll try to adjust a bit away from talking down going forward.
But the dogma that there is no way to create enough value to become a billionaire honorably is exactly what I’m fighting against, so someone who takes the opposite as an axiom needs to be talked down from that point first.