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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Curses, he's working to eradicate polio without suffering personally for it?

This has always been the argument in favour of things like materialist and capitalist philosophy - the outcomes are much better than the alternative.

There are countless well-meaning individuals who have achieved nothing, because they give their wealth away early on, compared to this one convenient counterexample in Gates, who firstly made obscene wealth with tactics that were pretty shady in my opinion, certainly anti competitive, then did flat-out more good.

If Gates were more relatively generous through his life, it is pretty plausible that he and a lot of poor people throughout in the world would be _worse off_. This is a strong argument against being relatively generous.

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I've made a similar point to yours myself in the past, and people really don't like hearing it.

I guess part of the problem is that Gates just so happens to have deployed his vast wealth for good, whereas there are plenty of very rich people that are ambivalent at best and (depending on your political viewpoint) negative at worst i.e. rich people funding climate-sceptic organisations.

On balance though I'm sticking to my point, which is that all the people preaching on incessantly about why us evil unenlightened need to mend our ways would do far better to shut up, make a stack of money being an evil capitalist, and then give it all away to their noble cause of preference.

Isn't that just feudalism? Or the idea of benevolent dictator? I feel it would be best to avoid such extreme wealth, and downplay the advantages of shady practices, to enable legitimate competition in all areas. To be honest, I feel this is actually the idea behind capitalism, it created the middle class, and that's its biggest strength. The truth is, under capitalism, for a while, the gap between poor and rich was at its lowest ever, and the middle class was at its strongest ever. That was its best attribute, and why it is lauded.

But, in recent years, we're seeing a shift, and that's why people talk about late stage capitalism, because it seems that it no longer creates the reduction in the extremes it did in tbe beginning. The question is, what can be done about this?

And I say that assuming that we learned many times already that a few ultra rich with concentrated power and wealth do not become generous and efficient leaders, solving world hunger, ending poverty, etc.

But you don't understand: eradicating Polio is one thing, but what if we instead lived in a world with competitive desktop operating systems? /s

Then the rules that got us there would probably ensure competitive drug prices too.

tl;dr: the ends kind of justify the means.

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