Earning a lot of money is a pretty damn good proxy for contributing to society. At the very least these people pay some taxes instead of being a drain on society.
Posting like this account has been doing will eventually get your main account banned too, so please don't create accounts to do this.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608078 and marked it off-topic.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
This doesn't mean you can't comment on divisive topics. It means that as the topic gets more divisive, comments need to become more thoughtful and more substantive, not less.
All money means is that you convinced someone else to give you money at some point in life.
Efficient allocation of resources to property development. Although that's just a technical distinction, you can get rid of it by separating out the improved vs unimproved value of land (the former is much less problematic than the latter).
>All money means is that you convinced someone else to give you money at some point in life.
Presumably, the convincing is because giving you money is better than the alternatives.
(compare a pleasant and profitable development to a development designed to exploit government incentives...the latter may well be more "efficient" in terms of economy)
Unfortunately, that's also more than you can expect from humans who know they can charge more and find tenants.
If you want to be technically pedantic, exclude the value of improvements on the property. You don't really want to tax the act of replacing an empty lot with a $10MM factory. You do want to tax the right to use land within the catchment of the various services the state provides. Land isn't produced, so you can't disincentivize producing it.
Effective asset management is valuable, just as ineffective asset management destroys value.
^ Except in the case of inherited assets (and titles). There is a reason the term is "land lord" after all...
Was this ever the case? I mean, look at the Victorian era and what amounted to forced labor camps in the coal mines of West Virginia – seems like profits are almost always sucked up to the top.
If you have 2 people, one which will contribute >30K a year in taxes, and another that will contribute 10k a year in taxes, that is free money on the table that we are losing out on, if we don't accept person 1.
This is not true. Anyone can claim that in a certain venture profits are not coupled to the contribution to society, as long as the person refuses to acknowledge or define "contribution to society".
For instance, do you consider T Bone Pickens to have contributed to society via his profits? If no, then what about Warren Buffet?
Why shouldn't the government optimize for letting people into the country that are going to give it a lot of tax dollars? We could then use those extra tax dollars to do things that society wants.
Absolutely not true for everyone. It depends heavily on how they make their money.
Many very wealthy people are also able to abuse loopholes and decrease their tax bills. Do you remember when people thought Trump didn't want to release his tax returns because they showed he paid zero taxes? Yes, that's a real thing. Billionaires making millions in a given year are able to pay nothing, if they organize their finances correctly.
Also, people have value to the economy outside of tax dollars. They also spend money, fill jobs that aren't filled by domestic workers, and produce babies (which wealthier people produce at a lower rate and which are necessary to fund things like Social Security).
Letting people in for a brick of hard cash seems much less likely to foster the sort of values that would result in visa holders not wanting to loot the country for a quick profit.
Earning a lot of money is a good proxy for contributing to society, except not everyone makes good money all the time.
I'm an immigrant and if you were to judge me based on my first few years in America, then clearly you shouldn't let me in to America. Now, at a later stage in my life, I would qualify for "startup visa" but if I wasn't already living in America for past 10 years, then I might not wanna come here (might not even be eligible for this visa to be fare).
What a weird reality tunnel you inhabit.
Fortunately you've mostly fixed this on HN, though not entirely. Please make the adjustments needed to correct this so I don't have to starting pleading with you not to get banned all over again.
(Also, please don't feed trolls. The thing to do with accounts like that is to flag their comments so we can ban them—not pour fuel onto the flamewar.)