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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

If you become wealthy within a society, it is on the back of that society in which you do it, so you effectively owe the society somewhat for your success, unless you think you'd have become a billionaire in the wilderness.

So if you get stinking rich and then don't contribute back in the form of tax, you're shirking your responsibility.

The workers you employ didn't train themselves, and your profit wouldn't exist without them toiling their lives away.

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This is an absurd take on social relations. It's equivalent to declaring that you're owned by "society" from birth, with an unchosen obligation you can never escape, because everything you do with other people is done "on the back of society".

Society, as such, doesn't exist. There is no corporeal "society". The only reality is other individuals, living their lives, interacting with you or not. In a civilized society they're able to interact - or not - by mutual consent.

The belief that every individual exists only to serve the group is false and evil.

I think your take on social relations is absurd.

Because actually, individuals as such do not exist, the only reality is there is just a bunch of living cells, interacting with each other.

The idea that cells only exist to serve the need of an individual is false and evil.

See, you've missed the word "somewhat", become victim to black and white thinking, and thus missed my point entirely. You, of course, own your own accomplishments, and the energy you've put into the world, and the ways in which you've been smart enough to extract value through efficiency such that you have created it. However, you cannot deny that you wouldn't have done anywhere near as well without the giants on which shoulders you stand and the world around you which others have worked to create, and thus you owe it. Somewhat.

How did that work for the Internet exactly? It obviously didn't work on some form of noblesse oblige that you presume it does. If you recall, the only people who used it were academics, technical professionals, or nerdy outcasts until sometime about the turn about the millenium. Why does society deserve any profit for something it doesn't care to understand? And, more fundamentally, what exactly is a society in a borderless world and what does it mean to be "responsible" for it?

Absolutely this. You'd expect people to do that but what they do instead is pull the ladder through lobbying.

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