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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.

I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service.

I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.

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Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town that has a store.

The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.

> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.

That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.

Your argument amounts to billionaire apologism and has nothing to do with my comment.

If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.

> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.

In capitalist countries, accumulation of wealth comes alongside the prosperity of the rest of the country.

Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" economy of Reaganomics. If only we had more billionaires, then I'm sure I'd be able to afford to get my car fixed.

Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't.

https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/why-is...

> Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong.

As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.

> If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor.

What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effect on my standard of living. Or yours.

> As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.

Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.

> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.

You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.

Name one CEO of a large company who fits your profile.

Elon Musk is a great example. These days, he mostly writes racist tweets, pretends to play video games, consolidates his own businesses to increase his own apparent net worth, and undermines the federal government.

May I remind you of your post I was replying to:

> He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.

Thanks for the reminder. Are you implying that EM does not invest in real estate or are you just being contrary?

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