PG's simplified essay seems like attack on a strawman; he's mainly arguing that inequality is good, but then mostly everybody agrees with that. The issue people see (and PG conveniently ignores) is increasing inequality - not locally increasing (i.e. an enterpreneur becoming rich because of a successful business idea), but globally increasing inequality, which happens because of rent-seeking, tax avoidance, buying po…
I've been thinking a lot about PGs assumption that you have to kill startups to decrease economic inequality. Is that really what's driving economic inequality's increase? Couldn't you quite likely have a world in which first generation entrepreneurs continue to be increasingly successful, but economic inequality doesn't increase lock-step with that?
For example, decreasing generational wealth, more of the proceeds from the increasing number of technology enabled companies going to more people (this certainly is a major factor at Google now for example), poverty decreasing (as PG suggests should be our target), and more seems like a world in which these ideas could co-exist.
It seems absolutely true that decreasing inequality for the sake of decreasing inequality's sake would be bad, which seems to be PGs point - you have to be targeting something that is specifically bad on its own, and perhaps which has a byproduct that is bad which is increasingly economic inequality. That seems right. But the idea that economic inequality will inevitably increase UNLESS we destroy the ability for people to start companies can't be correct.