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Comment by dabbernaught420 | Hacker News Reader

A person or group with immense power can trivially achieve great good.

However, if you consider systems A and B, where system A is a bit better at using immense power for good than system B, you will notice that system A will result in a lot more good than system B. Therefore, if you care even a little bit about good things happening, you will be very keen to have system A instead of system B.

The fact that someone with immense power does something good becomes a lot less reassuring when you consider the opportunity cost of not having someone or some people who are a lot better at achieving good have that immense power.

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Someone a lot better a doing good were not apparently good enough at getting the resources to do good.

You can't just dump a lot of power into someone you think that does good, because you have know way to know if (s)he is even able to manage that to start to do go.

At least bezos continues to improve the world infrastructure through amazon, and financing the space industry though blue origin.

> Someone a lot better a doing good were not apparently good enough at getting the resources to do good.

Yes, that is pretty close to my point. We have created a system in which good people are not the people who get a lot of resources.

If (s)he can't get/create resources, how can he do good? It seems you would just put a waster in power.

It's the difference between charity orgs with fading impact, and the ones that change people lives. Same applies to corporations, plenty changed the world for the better.

Think of the people behind creating wealth and think about the people who actually get wealth. You will find that the two groups differ drastically.

But this begets the question: How do we know that this system with Jeff Bezos is not already System A?

There are a lot of people who think they know what System A is and believe we are in System B but there's no lack of examples of people who get their chance to implement what they believe is System B and cause far more misery because they didn't know we were in System A (relatively speaking)

Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.

>Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.

It's easy to imagine systems which have more freedom and are better at rewarding competency. Like anarcho-syndicalism. If freedom and the rewarding of competency are what you value, why dismiss systems such as this? Throughout history humanity has gone through several systems. I'm not sure your justifications for believing the current one is the best would hold up to scrutiny.

The problem with more equal systems is that no one has that immense power to do good. So you end up needing to solve huge coordination problems that historically we are very bad at in order to achieve such projects. Governments have a bad track record of achieving such things relative to the private sector and they seem to be the best vehicle available for said coordination problems.

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