| > the capital risk wasn't yours so much. You asked "Who takes more risks" not who put more capital at risk. Founders I have known had plenty of capital and risking some of it on startups wasn't nearly as risky to their life as it was for many of their employees for whom this was their only roll of the dice and had no savings. > 6. Which brings more value to a community, a person who works in an office doing menial admin work for 5 years, or a person who spends 5 years founding a new company that provides medical services to the community, employs 100 people, and produces tax receipts (direct and indirect) of 1000x the person who works in an office doing menial admin work? I love the way you completely passed over whether or not the founder does any work at all beyond providing the capital. Plenty of founders work hard, but plenty more bring connections and capital and are otherwise a productivity drain. So again, as before, it depends on the productive work being done by that person. And they shouldn't get to take the credit for the taxes paid by their employees or the profits earned by everyone in the company. That's a shared achievement. And why define a person just by what they do in their job? The person doing menial admin work could be doing all sorts of other amazing voluntary work that eclipses anything the founder provides in value. > You don't have to hate or dislike people for creating value — creating jobs and providing services is crucial to the economies around the world. And yet it's ideologically orthodox to hate governments for doing exactly these things. > There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to such a question of "well the office worker has value too", yes, nobody is saying people are value-less, but there is an objective reality that some people produce more value than others. That is true enough. > Ultimately, my purposefully crafted questions lead up to one thing: some people deserve to be paid more than others. Even if it was true that people are paid according to the value they produce (they are not) it does not follow that they deserve to be. Take a doctor who delivers immense value to their patients. They can only do so thanks to the hospital they work in, thanks to the education they received and the equipment they have access to. Or consider a founder who starts a company benefitting from the concentration of talent created by a university doing world class research and attracting the best students. What people deserve to be paid is a social question. When we choose to pay San Francisco founders millions and let thousands of people be homeless, that's a social choice about our shared values. |