Quote Originally Posted by Jampie View Post
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.
There?s no doubt those three gentlemen have done things that benefit us all in the process of acquiring their wealth, but that?s not what you originally proposed. What have they done with the wealth they?ve acquired? I suppose some my say Musk has somewhat stepped into the void that has been left by US governments refusing to fund space exploration to the tune that they did, and the starlink program is good, but whether they?re done for altruistic purposes or whether that matters is another question.

No I?m by no means advocating total wealth equality, far from it. But the historic gains we made during the course of the 20th century in partially levelling up to use that awful phrase are in danger of being totally lost by unchecked capitalism, if they haven?t already done so. It will take brave politicians to grasp the nettle, and we?ve already seen the pushback even to the very modest proposals made by Starmer?s government, I?m not sure if he has the stomach to go further. People are easily seduced by demagoguery and easy solutions, and wealth is fantastically efficient at protecting wealth.