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by nnq
2324 days ago
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Just translate "deserves a billion dollars" to "gets to decide how most of a billion dollars gets allocated". Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.) The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative! Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion. (There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.) |
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[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/11/18/...