Comment by ashkankiani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashkankiani | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, so you believe you are the best judge of how to allocate resources, and that without the ability for a single person to decide this, we'll suffer... how exactly? Are you going to say we can't maximize productive velocity in tech development, or medicine, or something else where we need the maximum productive speed? How is all of that productive velocity going to benefit people? Will it regrow the forests that were razed for productivity? Will it unpollute the lead that was productively allocated to the air and the sea?

Do you see billionaires doing that right now? Are they the most efficient resource allocators? Is the $250 million that Elon is spending to influence the election the best use of that $250 million that he could've achieved?

I would like some more serious answers from you, otherwise don't bother allocating your effort to responding. I'm sure you, as an excellent allocator, will come to the same conclusion.

> Oh, so you believe you are the best judge of how to allocate resources

The person, our group of people, who have built the specific heap of wealth (e.g. a company) are the best stewards in my opinion. It does not mean that they WILL increase the wealth even more, they might run it into the ground, but they are the only ones who have the moral right and probably the experience.

I'll concede to see where this goes. Fine, it's allocated, not consumed.

Then consumption isn't the dispute, and the yachts are a distraction. So the question is what unbounded accumulation buys that bounded accumulation can't. Not welfare, since you've just said it's all reinvested.

What's left is control: over which projects get capital, which technologies get built, which politicians get funded. $250M toward an election is the same capital, doing the same "allocation." Is concentrated control over allocation a good we should maximize? And is "they built this heap" a sufficient moral title to it, including when the heap was inherited rather than built (which is the majority of the time)?

You should have a separation of money and politics, similar to separation of church and state. USA fails at both, the state is way too influenced by both religion and money. It should be illegal for churches or money to tell people what to vote for, it is in many other countries.

Without that you will always run into these sort of issues. The problem isn't wealth inequality, the problem is that wealth buys political power.

So if I found a company and it becomes worth a billion dollars, thereby making me a billionaire, I get the guillotine or what? Where is the cutoff for me losing the fruits of my labors?

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