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Comment by sevenzero | Hacker News Reader

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"Educate yourself" is almost always a shibboleth that the speaker of the phrase actually doesn't even know how to explain it to someone. It is a phrase of moral superiority and is not interested in whether the other person actually educates themselves or not. Or they might educate themselves and come to the opposite conclusion as you, in which case, maybe you should have educated (or indoctrinated) them first.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-i-refuse-to-educate-m...

The user in question, begins with assumptions on how wealth and markets work that do not match anything I know of in economics.

At one point they say that in a market economy there is no theft.

At another point they say that wealth concentration does not occur.

To begin to explain how they are working, I would have to invest in understanding the specific ideological framework they are using. Then figure out how to translate normal terms into their model.

This is a degree of care and effort I spend on people I love and care deeply about.

There is a threshold after which “educate yourself” is a genuine and reasonable statement, because the average person does not have the above average capability required to disentangle the motivated reasoning of a commenter.

> The user in question, begins with assumptions on how wealth and markets work that do not match anything I know of in economics.

I'm not surprised. My dad taught free market economics as a professor in his later years. Students would come up to him shocked that there was a case for free markets.

May I recommend any of Milton Friedman's books. Or "Capitalism" by Reisman. https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Treatise-Economics-Vol-1/d...

> in a market economy there is no theft

A free market economy is based on no force or fraud, and the government's job is to enforce that.

> wealth concentration does not occur.

Correct, in a free market.

I broadly agree with you, but do you believe the US has a free market? With regulatory capture and other ways to influence politics to favor one corporation over another, I don't think it fully does.

Read my responses here.

I did, which made me come to this conclusion. You seem to think value is created by extracting money from a product, while value actually is created by the work it takes to create said product. How much money one does extract has nothing to do with a products value. In your Tailor Swift example earlier, the value was created by her recording the music, not by her selling tours.

The value is absolutely in how much you can sell it. Otherwise every startup that subscribes to the "build it and they will come" philosophy would've been successful, which is obviously not the case and is a common problem that YC specifically tells founders to look out for. There is no value in building anything if you cannot convince others it is valuable. The labor theory of value is not valid.

> value is created by extracting money from a product

Nope. It is created by creating something valuable that other people want to pay for.

> value actually is created by the work it takes to create said product

That's the Labor Theory of Value, which is a Marxist tenet and has been thoroughly discredited. For example, a CEO can decide to take Bunker Hill, or take Sausage Hill. If he picks the more profitable hill, he created more money, with the same amount of labor.

> the value was created by her recording the music, not by her selling tours.

Nope. It was selling tickets to her concerts that made her a billionaire, not her music. That's why she did the concerts.

BTW, why do you think that some concerts charge more for tickets than other concerts? For the same amount of labor setting up the concert?

Indeed, I don't understand how anyone can seriously believe in the LTV anymore, as if someone digging holes should be as valuable in the economy, all else equal, as someone building something valuable. But that's what LTV proponents would have you believe apparently.

>He created more money

xd sure thing

Yeah I don't think this is the place for you here.

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