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Comment by door | Hacker News Reader

billionaire capitalists are not good news for humanity

Why not? These billionaire capitalists don't force people to work for them nor do they force people to buy their products and services - but people do in large numbers. A sort of democratic vote against your submission. Are the people who don't buy into their products suffering in some way? Explain!

Because everyone simply decided to participate in the prevailing social/economic system? I wish I could simply decide to opt out.

You can... You can move to a country that has the economic system you want or you can leave society all together.

i don't want to live in the woods, i want a world in which people who make iphones don't kill themselves

What a strange condition. Why not I want to live in a world where people aren't hungry? What about a world without suffering? A world without conflict and scarcity?

If iPhone manufacturing is your only gripe with this world we find ourselves in, I'd say we've got it pretty good.

i want all those things. my point was "if you dont like the system, leave" is a bad argument

You can't just leave and live in the woods like a hunter gatherer because there aren't enough people doing that to form an actual tribe.

You can't find 10 people dissatisfied with capitalism, on the internet??

Like Marc Andreessen said, Venezuela's great this time of year.

no individual capitalist forces someone to work, no, but the logic of the market necessarily leads to poverty and exploitation.

the market is not democratic, those who control more wealth and capital necessarily have more power.

That seems like the kind of broad brush statement that could never be substantiated.

it's bad that a single person has unaccountable command over a billion dollars

A $Billion isn't what it used to be...

pretty much every technological advancement and the quality of life improvement that came with it is through capitalism. There's a reason that Cuba and Soviet Russia were basically trapped in time

Capitalism does not require inequality and obscene compensation.

people aren't equal so you're going to have inequality unless you regulate things so everything is equal outcome, in which case you will end up with a failed civilization due to there being no reason for talented people to work hard because they get no benefit for doing so.

theres a difference between inequality in the sense of "a junior developer makes 60k, a senior developer makes 100k" (what you're talking about, and which is totally fine) and the inequality that actually exists, whereby a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people control a massive proportion of wealth while those in poverty lack access to food security, healthcare, childcare, the basic necessities of life.

>whereby a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people control a massive proportion of wealth while those in poverty lack access to food security, healthcare, childcare, the basic necessities of life

May be a more important question is why those people lack those things you mentioned. If for instance Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos never existed, would it make those poor people richer? You are not addressing the problem when you simply vilify the rich as the cause of the poor's woes. Your argument is intellectually dishonest and I think it stems from unnecessary envy.

In human history?

nearly all technological improvements are built, at their core, on work that was done by publicly-funded research or volunteer/non-profit work. the internet is a good example

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