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Comment by karpierz | Hacker News Reader

If winning the lottery is so great, why don't you just become a lotto winner?

Great analogy actually. The founders own the lottery ticket, but they pay employees cold hard cash despite the fact that the lottery ticket will likely be worthless. When the founder lose the lottery, and lose all of the unpaid hours and resources they personally put into buying the ticket, they don't demand employees reimburse them and share in the losses. But on the rare chance that they win the lottery, we have to have conversations like this about how "unfair" it is that they owned the ticket, despite paying everyone what they agreed to be paid.

So the point that the parent was making was "go buy your own ticket," not "go win the lottery."

The parent was making no point but was making an unreasonable argument in line of "No one can criticize, but if you believe that then why don't you make a profit?".

Similar to people who say "if crypto is a scam, why don't you short it?"

There are various reasons why people choose to or not choose to become an entrepreneur or why people choose to or not to short something. It doesn't mean just because a person doesn't want to be an entrepreneur, then capitalism is perfect.

The argument is a strawman where-in the original discussion was about billionaire entrepreneurs and how much is a fair reward to them.

We understand the entrepreneur deserve to be rewarded but the original question is up to what extent. Like how in some EU countries, CEO pay is capped.

They deserve to be rewarded by what the market will bear. By introducing ceilings on their income you'd be stifling people's will to "buy the lottery ticket". I can't wrap my head around why people think they know better than the market.

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