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Comment by gentle | Hacker News Reader

If you're rich and you can't recognize your debt to the society that enabled you to become rich, then you're a greedy, horrible person. Pay your taxes, for gosh sakes.

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Strongly disagree. My classmates picked on me, my teachers didn't challenge me. The state didn't pay for my education. I'm successful because I've applied myself while my peers were screwing off.

Just because you need consumers to become wealthy doesn't mean that you're exploiting them... wealth creation is NOT a zero-sum game. Becoming wealthy is the reward you get for making consumer's lives better.

Edit// For clarification, I'm fine with paying taxes. But I don't owe a debt to society just because of my success. I'm an equal citizen with everyone else, and we all benefit from the stability that government provides. I would also say that if the concept of "societal debt" is legitimate, then the poor have accrued much more debt anyway.

(I'm fine with the downvotes. My highest net-point posts usually start with some downvotes.)

That may be true, but it doesn't mean the government hasn't enabled you.

Most people fail to recognize that a big function of civilized society is to shift the power from the physically-strongest to economically- (or politically-) strongest. Enforcing property rights, keeping the horrible realities of war out of your life, building and maintaining the infrastructure that allows you mobility and access to goods and services, keeping the poor happy enough to avoid revolting against the (evolutionarily unnatural) rich, and maintaining a mostly fair capitalist market are major functions of government that the majority of us take for granted.

The rich benefit from these functions significantly more than the poor, so it makes a lot of sense for the rich to pay more taxes.

And here you are, posting on the successor to a government funded project, developed by brilliant minds who were likely the recipients of scholarships or state funded educations.

Just because some of humanity are dicks, doesn't mean that you didn't benefit from the people who aren't dicks.

And i'll reiterate what was said above. Just because you're making bank doesn't mean you're making people's lives better. You can make money making the lives of others awesome. But making bank doesn't necessitate that you're making the lives of others better.

That's the same logic that was used to over-inflate the sub-prime mortgage bubble. If you want to make the lives of others better, make sure you're doing that, rather than walmarting your customers.

Look man, just because the government created a packet switched network doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened eventually. Yes, war creates technology. Doesn't mean you should go bomb all the things.

I don't think Tim berners lee would ascribe his inventions to war making, nor CERN's. Just sayin'.

I guess that's not what cheez wanted to imply.

"In the 1950s, the United States Department of Defense was concerned about the ability to survive a nuclear first strike due to a dependence on an effective communication network. Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation concluded that the strongest communication system would be a computer network that would be able to break messages into units and that the network route these message units went along a functioning path to their destination, where they could be reassembled into coherent wholes."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#History

Tim Berners Lee invented HTML. Don't cherry pick the one example that makes your point. A thousand other technologies make up the Internet and they didn't depend on war.

But they all depend on TCP/IP.

So what? They all depend on the sun, quantum-scale interactions between atoms, and on the evolution of life on Earth too. Those are just as arbitrary as any other point being made here.

You take things too seriously. All I was saying is that people scream for "government funding because look Internet, GPS".

Both of these things were born out of war. I'm of the opinion they would have happened anyway.

Agree completely. The only honest way to make a living in a capitalistic society is to provide a service or product that someone wants. You can only make money by providing something people find valuable.

What's up with the downvotes on this and the parent? I think the comments may be a little short but clearly state a valid opinion.

Your comment's parent doesn't add anything to the conversation because it's a simple observation. I could add "I agree, people tend to spend money on things they want," and that would be valid.

But I haven't furthered the conversation because anyone familiar with the system of capitalism, i.e. everyone, knows this.

Yes, it's (approximately) true that the only way to make money is by providing something that people find valuable.

It doesn't follow, however, that if you make money then you must be providing something that is valuable overall.

Hypothetical example: I find a completely undetectable way to steal money from poor people and transfer it to rich people, except that 25% of it vanishes on the way. I offer my services to someone rich and unscrupulous. Although poor people don't have much money, there are a lot of them, and I am able to get my client $10M/year. She pays me $1M/year. (For some reason my method is only capable of enriching people who are already rich, which is why I don't just take the $10M myself directly.)

In this situation, I have provided something that someone finds valuable. It is unlikely, however, that I have made the world a better place (because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, etc., etc.), my actions would generally be considered unethical, and I wouldn't want to argue that I deserve all the money I'm getting that way.

(Some people would say that what I just described is the standard operating procedure of the financial industry. That may or may not have some truth to it, but all that matters for the point I'm making is that that general kind of thing can happen -- some jobs can be negative-sum but provide some people with enough benefit to make them well paid.)

You just described an act of theft. That wouldn't be legal in a free, capitalistic society.

If you are currently living and creating wealth in Somalia, then I agree - society doesn't help you much and if you pay any taxes, you can stop.

If you live in a first world country, you should realize that the difference between your country and Somalia is a result of government work and is funded by taxes.

Secure borders, police guaranteeing your property rights, courts, lack of bribes and corruption (relatively!), good roads, good lines of communications, educated people to hire. They don't just show up randomly in places.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

That said, this article is basically politics, and should be flagged as such.

I'm still confused at how the down-vote is supposed to be used. This person is getting down-voted for posting an opinion that people here disagree with. But it's a constructive opinion that has generated 5 constructive responses, which in turn has become a discussion. No reason for a down-vote here.

I upvoted but posted a dissenting opinion. The people downvoting are wrong.

"Wrong" in what sense? pg has said in the past that downvoting as a way of disagreeing is fine on HN.

'Wrong' in that it's like punching someone you disagree with as opposed to shaking his hand if you agree with them when you could have just voiced your thoughts. I presume pg says its fine because it'll mean less flamey comments.

If I recall correctly, that was in the sense of a comment being factually incorrect, or so far off-base as to represent a damaging assertion. That is, the need to signal to a reader would outweigh the desire to avoid downvoting based on disagreement.

In this case, civilian presented interesting points regarding independent accomplishment and his own feelings of disenfranchisement. I can't come up with a very good explanation for a downvote.

Warren Buffett made a comment to the effect of, even though he's intelligent and worked hard for his money, he still has to consider it luck that he happened to be born in the right circumstances because if he were born in a primitive hunter/gatherer society, he would be at the bottom no matter how smart he was because of his lack of physical strength. We all owe our success and the ability of be successful on the merits of our intelligence and hard work alone to the current structure of society to some extent.

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