You are 100% right. A million people can own $1000 in a corporation, or 1 person can own $1,000,000,000. The company has the same capital but wealth is distributed differently.
Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need billionaires.
Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need billionaires.
If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get a dictatorship. They don't seem to do much. It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at the same time.
Large investments are not the same as risky investments.
Government need to get a job done, but they also need to appease voters and play politics to be able to achieve long-term goals. Businesses self-select for efficiency in the long-term, because those that aren't efficient go bankrupt or get overtaken by a more efficient upstart.
I think PG has spilled a lot of ink about this in the context of VC investment, but the same idea doubly applies to government funding because their time horizons are even longer term. If all you do is optimize for next quarter, next year, or even the next 5 years, you're going to miss the things that at first seem innocuous or useless, but then in 30 years blow up into something huge.
NASA has been beholden to the latest administration’s whims and inconsistent budget allocation for decades.
I think the great challenge of our generation will be a way to come together with such single minded focus to tackle problems without trying to exterminate each other.
(1) https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/atomic-bomb-hist...
Except that's never happened, not even close. Ironically, the modern activists are busy trying to force businesses into getting involved in politics unrelated to their business. This smacks of foolishness to me, as in be careful what one wishes for.
> It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at the same time.
Wealth in a capitalist country is created, not concentrated.
You also seem to completely abandon your previous statement: "Countries without billionaires are mired in poverty. Billionaires can make high risk investments. A million people won't." Additionally, you've responded to arguments I haven't even made about forcing businesses to be involved in politics.
Your ideas seem like a loose collection of conservative talking points and fail to make any sort of coherent argument.
Caesar gained power through running a business providing people with wine?
> You also seem to completely abandon your previous statement
Not at all. It is obvious that people who became wealthy through force of arms or using taxation to line their pockets are in a different category.
If you look at historical rankings of wealth, by far the richest people were leaders of great empires. They were so wealthy that it's silly to put it in modern terms (1) & (2). Caesar Augustus controlled the entire output of Egypt which was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world. His person wealth is estimated to be in the $5 to $10 trillion range.
More recently, how rich was Stalin when he could literally do anything with an economy making up 10% of global GDP? It's even unclear how much Putin is worth with credible accusations that he recently built a $1B palace (3) and has a wealth in the $200B range.
It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources. I sincerely hope you develop a sense of how important these institutions are.
This is my last comment btw, I hope you feel like you've learned something.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...
(2) https://www.luxuo.com/the-lux-list/super-rich/richest-people...
Stalin didn't buy his way into power. He took power by force, then used that power to make himself rich.
This is not capitalism. As I pointed out, people who take money through force are in a quite different category.
> I hope you feel like you've learned something.
I'm dumbfounded that you believe that Stalin, Caesar, etc., were free market capitalists gaining their wealth through running a successful business.
> It is only our recently invented democratic institutions that enable billionaires who profit from non-violent sources.
None have yet turned that into running the country. Note how billionaire Bloomberg's presidential campaign failed miserably. As did Ross Perot's. Rich people in America have not had much of a track record of buying themselves into office, though elected representatives have a tendency to get very rich while in office. Hmmm...
Kickstarter exists.