O/T:- Trump Presidency 2.0 [hic sunt dracones]

[slack_pie]

Zuckerberg did advance the field of social media massively. Bezos pioneered online retail and maintained it in the fact of ridicule in the early days. Musk brought electric motor vehicles back into the mainstream.

And all of them made mistakes. Musk appears to be an insufferable git of epic proportions.

But I ask, what is the alternative? Do you advocate total wealth equality? Everyone has to have the same income and assets? Who decides what businesses invest in? Who decides who runs the businesses? Some government board? I think the results would be far worse.

For all its faults, free market capitalism does operate more as a meritocracy than any bureaucracy or democracy I've ever witnessed. Of course there's the problem of inherited wealth and I think you could argue that doing away with that would be of benefit.

I agree with most of that. I understand what BFP is saying - it's pretty crazy that some people can acquire so much wealth that they could never conceivably spend it all. That said, on a philosophical level, I'm uncomfortable with the state having the power to decide how much money someone is allowed to acquire through legal means.

Of course mega-wealthy people should be taxed, but saying that people cannot become billionaires or trillionaires seems fundamentally wrong to me. People should be free to earn as much (or as little) as they like, with measures in place to stop people falling through the cracks and provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.

Free-market capitalism results in "unfairness", but that's an inevitable result of free people making free choices. And yes, we are all born with advantages and disadvantages, but you can only iron those out through extreme overreach and control that inevitably ends in tyranny.

Don't agree about inherited wealth though. A big part of the motivation for me to save money and build wealth is so that I can pass it on to my kids. It's my money, so it's their money, not the state's.

[drillerpie]

Brilliant conversation gents, long may it continue.

[Jampie]

Don't agree about inherited wealth though. A big part of the motivation for me to save money and build wealth is so that I can pass it on to my kids. It's my money, so it's their money, not the state's.

Yeah that's the counterargument and it's why I used such wishy-washy weasel words. You could argue doing away with it would be of benefit, but people also argue (compellingly) that it should stay.

Personally I would rather we worked collectively to give the next generation the best (fair) chance possible, and to an extent we do. But yeah, I don't have strong feelings about inherited wealth.

What I find interesting about threads like these is how close we are to universal agreements on so many things. And yet the media have us yelling at each other over whether dickhead of the year ten years running did a nazi salute or not, or what the liar of the year for ten years running has claimed he's going to do next. Or who should pee in which toilet.

That's not a coincidence, IMO. I really do think there's a kind of non-spiracy of those in power keeping the commoners snapping at each other so we don't guillotine them all. Because they really are screwing up a lot at the moment and while some of them got where they are at least partially on merit, a lot did not.