Hacker News Reader

Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Can we all just stop listening to rich peoples various sinister ideological schemes to enslave us all so they can go live on yachts or on some space station while earth rots?

Thanks.

View on HN

Can we all stop issuing random fatwas that expect everyone to agree with their braindead reasoning? Thanks.

Unpopular opinion: Wealthy individuals are inspiring and we should listen to what they have to say. They became wealthy by building stuff that millions if not billions of people value.

May be you're forgetting this? Or is this just the normal cynicism that we must exhibit?

This feels like an absolute that isn't inherently true (maybe you didn't mean it as an absolute? I could be reading it wrong). Not every wealthy person "became wealthy by building stuff that millions if not billions of people value". Even for those that did, not everyone is right all the time - just because you sold a lot of a thing doesn't mean you're going to have great opinions on everything else.

And, just because you're wealthy doesn't mean I owe your opinions my time. In the specific case of Andreesen here, I've disagreed with him so strongly over the years that I didn't bother giving his manifesto a chance, and from most of the comments I've seen, I don't think I've lost anything there. I don't care if he founded Netscape, or throws his cash around to new companies in an effort to generate more cash for himself, his opinions have missed the mark many, many times.

Wealth != Great ideas

Mostly, not absolute. We have flukes like Theranos and FTX. But for the most part. It's not a matter of opinion, the media and progressives have convinced themselves that we should abandon capitalism while Asian countries have adopted it wholesale and lifting people out of poverty at an unprecedented rate.

Meanwhile, our progressive centers are crumbling. And we want more of this–and it manifests in the most glib form as–Billionaire hate.

The reason why you're seeing so much push back for this manifesto is because it goes against the power centers of progressivism.

I don't necessarily disagree with this at a high level, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the idea that we have to listen to what someone has to say simply based on their level of wealth, or that their level of wealth automatically makes them "inspiring".

It's of course far more broad: every liberalized, affluent country on the planet has intentionally adopted market based economic systems. Absolutely none of them are Socialist, Fascist, or Communist, and there are no exceptions.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland (to name some of the most popular targets) - none of them are remotely close to being Socialist, and those are the only super nice countries the pro-statist crowd can ever pick from (when declaring that Socialism works). They all rely heavily on market based economic systems, they are all massively loaded with private wealth (typically the most millionaires per capita of anywhere), and the extreme majority of their economies are privately owned and private operated. They are in fact solid demonstrations that market based economies are vastly superior to statist economies.

You're pretty much spot on, I was addressing the trend and the rate of change, and a more general zeitgeist. Of course, the drumming of the state expansion that you see ad-nauseum on HN and elswhere. Anti-car culture. The kindness industrial complex which has led to insane amount of suffering ironically. Refugee crisis and migration policies. People on welfare. The rise of academic expert class. The DEI industrial complex.

All of these IMO converge to: You will own nothing, and you'll be happy.

WEF agenda is explicitly laid out for you read.

Just google what Marc Andreessen looks like and you'll understand why he is such a contrarian.

They've built things that extract value from millions if not billions of people. Everything else is secondary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com