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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Money serves two purposes, rewarding people and putting control of resources in the hands of people and institutions most able to invest them wisely. Billionaires are not necessary for the first but they are for the second.

If you think that a billion-dollar company can exist, then combining what we know about the inefficiency of committees with that fact we arrive at the conclusion that perhaps some people can reasonably be given control of billions as well.

Billionaires spend a small fraction of their money on superyachts and keep most of it invested which is the system working if you believe in it.

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I don’t know if you’ve spotted this - but money serves a couple of other purposes too.

Some people use money to destroy or buy out their competitors. Some people use money to bribe or corrupt politicians and by extension to corrupt the entire democratic process. Some people use money to influence the media. And in these and many other ways, money can be used to make even more money in a runaway cycle without there being an efficient allocation of resources.

On an abstract level, money can buy politicians, but politicians can redistribute money to buy votes (and maybe save a cut for themselves). I have always wondered why one of those happens but the other does not.

Wait, what? Is there a typo or a missing word there? Both of those happen quite a lot. Bribery, political donations, Lobbying (in its worst forms), campaigning (in its worst forms), and pork barrelling all happen over and over.

There are also a lot of harder-to-prove forms of political corruption, such as when a politician uses their power to benefit a company or industry, and then after retiring from politics they are given lucrative work with those same companies or in that industry. (And many many variations on this theme.)

They both happen, but what we hear is not dire warnings of how the public is ransacking corporations, but the other way around.

What percent of the general public would be interested in ransacking corporations? and by this we mean taking money specifically, not just damaging their reputations, nor necessarily locking them up for their crimes.

Generally the law makers have made laws against Free agents (ie competitors) from colluding.

We haven't always had this extreme degree of income and wealth inequality. Investments still happened.

> Billionaires spend a small fraction of their money on superyachts and keep most of it invested which is the system working if you believe in it.

But in the event of a major war, and if it goes nuclear, biological or chemical, the billionaires can hole up on their yachts and ride it out in the relative safety of the middle of the ocean, just like the film Waterworld but less apocalyptic, so was the system working or is this why sanctions have been imposed? Its not like any of these billionaires can just take off now is it?

While I think you’re correct that money can serve those two purposes, I don’t think that it in fact does so universally or exclusively, or even necessarily intentionally.

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