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Paul Graham's response to AOC's statement on billionaires

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Re: Paul Graham's response to AOC's statement on billionaires

#11

Post by briefcomment »

naveen99 wrote: post #10
briefcomment wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should not enable what happens after you get more than, say, $50 million. After you've bought a few really nice houses and given your kids the best education money can buy, all you're really doing with that money is imposing your will on others without that kind of money, and often without their say. Lobbying politicians, setting up foundations, etc., is usually a rich person telling others what they should…

Maybe we should ban prime numbers above 50 million also... Or stop fighting reality... :)

Fighting reality? Socialism has already existed in the real world.

Re: Paul Graham's response to AOC's statement on billionaires

#12

Post by olliej »

Startups aren’t made by billionaires, the workers at those startup aren’t billionaires, the people who make the most money out of a startup are the billionaires who invest in the first place.

The people who design an iPhone are seldom millionaires, ditto for the people who write the software, the people who actually build them, and the people who buy them.

Startups may make billionaires, but that doesn’t mean those startups haven’t benefited primarily from no -billionaires.

More over the bulk of the money those billionaires have are either cash (so not contributing anything to anyone), or investment funds (eg not adding capital to new businesses, and not injecting money into the economy).

So the bulk of assets held by billionaires are only benefiting those billionaires, and then they aren’t actually doing anything with it except hoarding.

Billionaires don’t add value to the economy. Because one billionaire is never going to be spending more than 20 thousand times more than an average American. So they aren’t contributing proportional to the amount they benefit from the economy.

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