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Comment by s_y_n_t_a_x | Hacker News Reader

Some humans are lazy and some humans are greedy.

Capitalism exploits the greedy humans into generating wealth by rewarding them greatly, it also generates many jobs and assets for the economy. Yes that one person gets rewarded greatly, but many masses would not benefit if they never existed or were never motivated to do those things.

The lazy humans will fleece the system until there's nothing left. Some people need survival to motivate them to climb.

Socialism fails when you run out of other people's money. There's many examples of that.

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Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy? My theory is that they have been able to focus the wealth the country generates on themselves instead of others. If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing. Do you think e-commerce would be any smaller without Bezos? No way.

> Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy?

I literally called them greedy in my argument, not virtuous. I don't believe they are all virtuous, some might be. Some are seeking their passions. All are greedy in some capacity.

> If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing.

I don't understand, we replace them with another person? Or would a government entity take over their assets they generated.

What I am saying is that billionaires get rewarded disproportionately more than their actual contribution. They also get listened to way more than they deserve.

There is absolutely nothing socialistic about any of the campaigns in the running. You're just creating a straw man.

Accruing capital almost never has anything to do with hard work or laziness. It's a lot of luck. What family you were born into, what area of the world, if you had parents growing up etc. You could be the laziest POS and have more money than you could spend in a lifetime.

Tax-funded education and healthcare is necessary to offset some of the insane luck a trust fund kid has vs kid with a single mother with debt and no inheritance in sight. So everyone can have a fair shot at participating in capitalism. Nothing remotely socialistic about it.

Bernie Sanders, one of the frontrunners, calls himself a socialist because he is one. At least he admits it.

He is not a socialist. Nothing he is proposing is socialism.

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