If you ask me 100% of income, assets, and total net worth should be taxed once you hit 999,999,999 dollars. Congrats you win monopoly, now everything else you contribute helps other people, you can choose to retire so you help less people, start a foundation so you can help people in your own way, or just keep working even though you don't get extra points.
This article points out that Thiel wants to wind back the power of the FDA. The situation is a spectrum of people & corporations negotiating their own outcomes through to Steny Hoyer & Kevin McCarthy doing the negotiation. Both ends of that spectrum are legitimate and there it is simply an option that any given government regulator might be doing more harm than good & be a target for abolishment.
The people who believe they have a god given right to force other people to adopt their risk tolerance and value judgements are ugly. These are the sort of people who routinely make nice promises and then turn out to be damaging and egotistical. They aren't building systems that make people better off, we can see the results - they routinely make the situation worse or create single points of failure that get corrupted. It is not a given that a decision is better made if it is made in Washington.
Those sorts of people have made a lot of enemies over the last 3 years, they in particular should not be put in a position of power over others. Doctors in the CDC have proven to be quite willing to destroy lives and economies without much of a cost-benefit analysis on the way, and it is unclear that the FDA would de drawing from a better pool of people.
It is interesting now, with benefit of hindsight, to look over the COVID stats (I was glancing at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-... for this comment). It'll be interesting to learn if the measures that were foisted on the States were effective, but they are quite difficult to see in the high-level numbers. And given that 3 million people die each year in the US anyway, there really are questions to be raised about how effective the compulsory aspects of the COVID regulations were.
>Thiel, meanwhile, became an archetypal nineteen-eighties geek—a talented student, chess player, and science-fiction enthusiast who was bullied by his peers.
Lots of queer kids had a hard life Petey[0] -- that's not a free pass to do whatever you want.
- Greg
[0] > Thiel, meanwhile, became an archetypal nineteen-eighties geek—a talented student, chess player, and science-fiction enthusiast who was bullied by his peers.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/wh...
1- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/technology/peter-thiel-ma...