331–340 of 660 posts
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Pay your employees more, or be taxed near 100% on the excess gains?
But why? If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services what moral justification is there for it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?
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"permits the existence of Jeff Bezos" - your mind on capitalism. What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of making bombs and satellites for world wars?
Bezos' AWS made cloud computing viable, leading to the last two decades of economic growth without per capita energy consumption (due to datacenter energy efficiency). Bezos' Amazon lowers the cost and availability of goods of all kinds drastically, enriching everyone (and especially the poorer among us). The State makes bombs and drops bombs, not Bezos. Bezos deploys capital in ways which have proved to fill market…
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Let's just have a really large number of reasonably well to do actors deciding how to allocate capital. After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of course there will be stupid and actively harmful allocations. But the government does both of those things too. So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to the government.
Kind of.
If the premise that government + a few rich people is a better way to spend $ (e.g. our current system !) then how about we also try government + spreading $ around so a lot of people are well off and can "allocate capital".
The fact is a rising tide lifts all boats.
The ability to create extreme wealth in a democratic capitalist society is an indicator of the economic freedom. It is the wealth that gives us the freedom to invest in new knowledge creation to solve problems. The more wealth the more opportunities, especially when they are in the hands of someone who have proven again and again their ability to create value to society. Elon Musk is of course the obvious example but…
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No, people don't know this. The degree of economic and historical naiveté has really skyrocketed in recent decades. "Let's just try a planned society one more time , THIS time will be different, look how nice and kind we are!" is a perfectly reasonable statement to many educated people today. It's really an indictment of the education system.
You are mocking people using a false dichotomy. Complaining that some individuals shouldn't be able to control trillion in wealth don't imply a push for centrally planned economies.
It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).
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OK, so people who are good at managing their money are ... drum roll, please ... better at managing their money. This is a tautology. The question is not whether rich people are better at running their own finances, it is whether they are the best people to be making resource allocation decisions. In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so they will do…
> This is just so absurd that it's really not worth deconstructing. Do you believe Bezos got rich by not giving people what they wanted?
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Zero is the natural interest rate? That’s ludicrous. A dollar today is always going to be worth more than a dollar tomorrow.
Why is this the case about the worth of a dollar?
A dollar you own today has zero risk of not being delivered tomorrow.
You can invest that dollar one day sooner.
If there’s a general expectation of inflation, it exchanges for more today than tomorrow.
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> If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon. The choice is a false one.
Come on. You make it sound as if Amazon started a campaign to directly shut these in-person businesses down. The reality however is more mundane and exactly what parent comment mentioned: people voted with their feet and dollars, the in-person businesses that did shut down could not adapt and we are all the better for it.
In anything other than the short term, you can really make yourself better off by making other people worse off. It’s a feudalist mentality that’s totally obsolete in free markets. Loads of people just continue buying this snake oil by the tankload, making themselves unhappy and unfortunate. Not a way forward.
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(I see you edited your post to add the last line). Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over large quantities of economic and financial resources, and because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin" those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase of an asset followed by its degradation. But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might have happened in Elon was not in a posi…
You could make the opposite argument about all the innovations, are and science, rich people have funded throughout history. Like what if Boeing didn't have all that money to dump into airplanes.
Secondly, we now see a company whose products have severe safety defects due to the influence of cost-cutting managers, more concerned with profits than quality.