Come here and work on hard problems – except the ones on our doorstep

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do? It increases the demand for food, clothing, housing , etc. in the area. This is _not_ a bad thing. This means businesses in the area, if they are allowed to, will grow and new businesses can come into existence. For a real world example, look at Apple, for example. Apple employs 13,000 in Cupertino. However, Apple also indirectly creates 70,000 additional service jobs in the area through their direct employment. Are you saying this is a bad thing? This is much better multiplier than manufacturing.

The only issue we run into here is housing. If the area can't accommodate the increase in demand, housing prices will increase. This means owning a business will be more expensive, meaning the costs of everything will increase. This is what we're seeing in areas like SF.

But the thing is, this doesn't just have to be the super-rich who cause this. If you see an increase in demand for living in a specific area for any reason, a similar thing will happen as if a bunch of super-rich move into the area.

Further, the super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities, so they'll contribute far less to the increases in the cost of living than previously assumed.

So this entire argument of yours really doesn't make sense to me.

> It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention

And this is a completely different topic and again I don't understand for what you're arguing. The government has had a monopoly on education for a long time and has gone to great lengths, in both primary and secondary schooling, to intervene. In many ways, this has driven up the cost of education and driven down the quality. But this is mostly a tangent.

> When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??

I wouldn't call the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, a Randian dystopia. The amount of regulations and taxes one must deal with in this area is astounding. You even brought up the sad state of public education. How is this Randian in any way imaginable? You're on the wrong end of the spectrum.

OP is offering a possible partial solution to exactly the problem you present here. With fewer children born into poverty, some degree of abatement is likely. I'm not sure why you dismiss the notion out of hand, refuse to engage the actual idea, and then immediately mischaracterize the original position to be some absurd straw-man in which the OP is adjudicating the "worthless[ness]" of various people.

It's almost as if people on the internet don't know how to properly argue the actual ideas presented, and instead prefer to just make shit up.

Agree that the tyranny of the majority still applies in the case of democracy - see the UK EU in-out referendum impending mess.

Stepping over homeless people on my way to a cushy tech job has given me loads of cognitive dissonance. I have a really hard time with this, and I think about it every single day on my way to work. Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about it, and I'd love to have an open discussion instead of an anti-american one. Everyone here who's arguing about their superior European social programs are really preaching to the quire, because most Americans on Hacker News would kill to have these social programs.