“To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: The Pitchforks Are Coming”

seems like prisoners dilemma. if all businesses pay workers better the business does better and society benefits. if a lot of businesses don't invest in workers society isn't as well off. but all businesses need to act or the cheaters prospers.

Give the plebs cake so that they ignore our regulatory capture and rent seeking. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Yes, to a certain extent, the success this article speaks of can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time with the correct amount of resources _and_ the propensity--and tolerance--for risk and the tenacity to work hard and smart on a goal. Often times, when approaching entrepreneurs, the last two are emphasized and the former are dismissed. Timing is something that can not be equalized. Its just a fact of reality.

What can be equalized is the knowledge to be able to take advantage of a situation when it presents itself. This is not taught in school. This is often passed from parent to child, mentor to protege. Tenacity and risk taking are likely inherited so they cannot be equalized.

Of course, a proper definition of Risk would be barren or a non sequitur without the understanding that having basic needs met or having a fall back position certainly separates the wild eyed failed Willy Lomans from the perceived rational but radical successes like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Certainly they took risks. Certainly they broke rules. What they did not have was thousands of dollars in student debt and unstable housing situations that would cause them to fail completely if a venture failed to pan out.

Even re-visiting the simple regulatory capture of zoning would begin to alleviate this. If you needn't spend 750 thousand dollars to be close to the source of funding required to grow a business and need not have expensive audits and permitting to begin to manufacture a product to test a market, you would be in a better position to fall back upon failing to seek funding or gaining market penetration.

The worst offender in the arena of regulatory capture is overly broad Work For Hire agreements and baroque and costly Patenting regulation. If you do not have the ability to explore your own ideas when not performing work related to your primary source of income, you do not have the ability to risk creating a new intellectual property asset. Given that in many jurisdictions, you cannot live in a car or on the street and make use of public facilities such as libraries to do your work, you need a primary income in order to engage in such activities--unless you already have been provided one by parents or benefactor. Even further exasperating this issue is that once you have an asset that prima facie is not relevant to the work performed at your primary source of support, you need additional funds to risk to obtain assistance navigating the complex legal process of patenting and defending your assertion that the asset does not fall under the scope of a work for hire agreement--which may be implicit depending on the jurisdiction.

Come back to me when you fix these issues; not hand outs to people who have not. When anyone can pursue their ideas independent of the regulatory structure and overbearing presence of aggressive patenting, zoning or access limitation, aggressive employer enforcement of WFH either explicit or implicit, and overly burdensome regulatory barriers to competition, then you can tell me that the free market isn't working and we need to rely on transfer payments.