[IronIvan]

This type of thinking is pure toxin because it essentially reinforces exactly what you don't want.

If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create.

Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.

[data_maan]

Pure toxin is a bit harsh, no?

I can tell you what kind of incentives such a system promotes: different ones!

In particularly a welfare system gives incentives to people who want to create something out of intrinsic motivation, not because of financial motivation. Many of the things the most profitable companies use are actually but on tools and mathematics that were created without any financial freedom.

So I would rather reserve the word "toxic" rather for the current system consisting of purely financial motivation to hoard money that your are so vigorously defending.

[danaris]

Nobody, at least in the US system, gets very wealthy just by working hard.

At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something.

Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simply would never make, because they're morally reprehensible. I wrote another comment about this [0] on an article about a week ago, but basically, in the very best case scenario, once you're past the point where more money would make no material difference in a healthy lifestyle (which is going to happen, at the very latest, somewhere in the millions), if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013858

[prottog]

Nobody anywhere gets very wealthy just by working hard. Otherwise the world would be filled with millionaire janitors.

> if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.

If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of lives by the amount of value created. If you capture a little bit of that value for yourself and become fantastically rich, good for you and good for the system that enabled this whole thing. Even better for you if you decide to give some of it away, but to call you evil if you don't? I suppose your own belt could be tightened a bit more so that you could give more away?

Other than what arises from rent-seeking behavior, profit is not inherently immoral.

[data_maan]

Peter Thiel is a really good example of using a loophole in law, to make fantastic wealth using his Roth account.

Full story here: https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...