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Comment by heresie-dabord | Hacker News Reader

> The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity.

Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.

The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.

Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.

This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).

EXACTLY, thank you! I run an international human trafficking and drug smuggling operation. I know that what I'm doing is good for society:

- It makes me and my partners extremely rich

- It creates jobs for at-risk youth

- It provides products and services that people want

It benefits society! I am a benefit to society! Why can't anyone see this?

That's all good if you assume people can't be tricked (tricked into paying more, tricked into buying something they don't want, tricked into working harder). The tricked person ends up with less and Elon ends up with more.

yeah man i'm sorry i don't believe people were "tricked" into buying teslas or whatever

Yeah sorry I was thinking about value as more about quality of life and society. If you define it as shareholder value and producing stuff, then by definition corporations and their executives are of course contributing the most.

Is making shareholders rich contributing to society and humanity?

yes it is. your pension scheme has stake on the same stocks.

Yikes.

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