What incentive is there to work to become rich if you have to give it away anyway?
Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic external levers. We have agency, understanding, and drive to have empathy and to create.
People don't naturally collaborate the way you see them in the developed world no.
The idea that people in the wild are uncivilised savages is old racist propaganda.
I suggest erring on the side of earnesty when replying. The discussions that come out of those threads tend to be more interesting.
I think you would be conscripted to fight whether you liked it or not, and inculcated with the belief that it's the right thing to do. Maybe even feeling shame are your unwillingness but forcing yourself to fit in anyway.
As some french guy said, probably: "De la contrainte nait la créativité"
The discrepancy comes from confusing money with wealth. You can take my $100 and then you will have $100. But if you take my business away from me, you will end up with very little. And so will everybody else that was benefitting from the business that I was running.
The incentive is that you could potentially enjoy something briefly and that's the best deal you can get.
Many people might say that is a lower incentive than to being able to leave your family better off than they were, or in your more greedy interpretation, so that their children and their children can enjoy something less briefly than you were able to.
You want the incentive to get rich and then have that incentive fall off as you acquire more wealth.
The list of enormously valuable privately developed technologies goes on and on- in fact, almost all technologies. Many of these developed in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very little government spending on research/etc. For example, oil, railways, cars, etc.
Even in cases where government research did help, often the practical realization takes a lot of money!
P.S. Companies are not necessarily collectives. It depends on the ownership structure.
Did you know that their entire aviation industry was based on technology copied from a B-29 bomber that made forced landing in Russia?
Yes, but people like examples. There are plenty more. N Korea, for example. China, when they had collective farms. It goes on and on, to the point were I can't find any examples of successful collective farms.
> It was an incompetently managed and corrupt state
Nobody has ever managed to create one otherwise. State run economies are always a mess.
Consider all the innovations that come from Bell Labs, Xerox, Kodak, Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Nvidia, RCA, US Steel, Ford, General Electric, industrialized agriculture, Dow Chemical, and on and on and on.
Every modern economy is a mixed economy where you have some private funding and collective funding, some collective ownership and some private ownership. Countries that try to embrace either extreme of all private or all public end up collapsing. Arguing between either extreme like it's some moral dilemma is kinda pointless.
The thing that works is a little of both. It's actually kinda funny, when someone argues for extremely wealthy individuals pushing the country forward by making unilateral economic decisions you end up arguing for a form of central planning. But massive wealth consolidation isn't doing anything for you when the rest of us are fighting over the scraps.
This is the "fixed pie" view of the economy, i.e. if someone has more, that means others have less. That may be true of socialism, but in free markets it is not true at all.
Wealthy people create wealth, they do not "consolidate" it.
If I go to Home Depot, buy some wood, make a table and sell it to you I created wealth, I didn't take it from you. If you planted an apple tree, harvested apples and traded them for the table, you didn't take wealth from me - you created the wealth.
PS. I don't think it's a coincidence that both of your examples of creating wealth are typical "poor people" jobs. Obnoxiously wealthy people rarely create anything because they can simply pay someone else to do it, usually for a fraction of the value of their output.
That's the Labor Theory of Value perspective. What actually happens in those cases is the particular jobs being done are not that productive. Consider if you could pay someone $10 to do $100 worth of work. Inevitably, your competitor sees you making this easy money, and entices your worker away for $11. Then you entice him back for $12. Then Fred entices him away for $13. See where this is going? The wages go up until it is barely profitable to employ the person.
> Obnoxiously wealthy people rarely create anything
What they do is conceive of it, finance it, and manage it. Those are critical wealth-producing activities. Start a company yourself, and this will quickly become apparent.
> is rarely distributed among those who actually do the work
Scores of millions of destitute people immigrated to America in the 19th century and moved up into the middle class and beyond.
Also, free markets do not "distribute" wealth. Again, that is the fixed pie viewpoint. The actors in free markets create wealth.
> Predatory pricing,
I.e. offering lower prices. Nothing wrong with that.
> regulatory capture
That's a problem with government, not free markets.
> and buying out competition
Nothing wrong with that, either. Lots of conglomerates become so complicated they collapse, and new competitors always spring up.
Consider, even without such a system, more people than you realize have enough to live on (and pass on for generations), but still work. A lot of rich people also didn't work for their wealth. People have worked their whole lives and not become rich. I'm not sure there's a connection.
It turns out that selfish incentives are far more effective than any others.
And the result you have is: the modern American economy, where most efforts go into derivative financial products and investing, rather than actual productive enterprise. Day-to-day goods and services get worse and more expensive while the stock market keeps going up.
> where most efforts go into derivative financial products
No evidence for "most".
> and investing
Yes, investing in productive enterprises.
Who do you think invested in Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, etc?
You're looking at just the APY on savings accounts. Actually the rich make far more than that on interest-derived financial products through various forms of rent-seeking. Interest is the hidden tax baked into every transaction. Some studies found interest accounts for roughly half of end-user prices—12 percent on garbage collection, up to 77 percent on public housing.[1]
And as Musk warns: “If we don’t act, the entire government budget will be used just to pay interest — there won’t be money for anything. No, there won’t be money for Social Security, no Medicare, nothing. That’s where we’re headed.” [2]
In the late-stage capitalist West, most public and private money goes to servicing interest at some point in the food chain.
[1] https://base.socioeco.org/docs/margrit_kennedy.pdf
[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/e...
The US would not be the wealthiest country in the world if its wealth was acquired through rent seeking.
Then why wouldn't I just stop working? Why bother working at all if I'm guaranteed to be subsidized by other people?
And if you wanna express yourself creatively or just do nothing for a while, that's fine by me too! I'm sure you'd get bored after a while and want to make yourself useful again, so I don't think you should starve in the meantime.
You have hobbies and personal relationships to give your life meaning, you pay to be allowed to do that not the other way around.
And why don't you want to turn that around?