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Comment by runninganyways | Hacker News Reader

I earn $100,000 a year writing god awful code for a doomed software company. Am I contributing more to the public good than the restaurant worker who cooks my food, the guy who changes my car's oil, or the guy who hauls all of my garbage away?

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You may not be, but it seems that your employer is already doomed and they won't be around for long unless they do something to contribute to society. That's generally what happens to those that don't contribute: doomed to fail in the long-run.

It doesn't really matter; the system works by everyone working for their benefit; and history consistently shows that it works better than alternates such as communism, where some powerful dude decides what's good for everyone (and will shoot you if you don't enthusiastically agree 100%)

So yeah, you make decent living by writing awful code, good for you. If you think you don't deserve it, feel free to overtip your waiter. The alternatives are much much worse.

Aren't you describing a dictatorship? In communism, the state owns things, but the state can be the people; i.e. democratic communism. Isn't communism just the absence of private property? (that is, everything is public property)

And of course, collective ownership doesn't require central planning. Things can be distributed.

I am describing actual communism, while you are describing imaginary communism which has never existed

> The alternatives are much much worse.

We don't know that. We know that some of the explored alternatives had different sets of trade-offs, in some cases making them pretty terrible.

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