[WalterBright]

> If you have even just a small group of people, the odds change drastically.

Yup. Bob is good at making gill nets, Ted is good at gathering berries. Fred is good at making a cabin. Sam is good at bow hunting. They trade their surpluses. A small economy. None have the skills needed to go it alone.

[autoexec]

> None have the skills needed to go it alone.

Yet the idea of a "self-made millionaire" is pervasive and people were pretty quick to hate on the "You didn't build that" observation.

[WalterBright]

If you ever open a business, you'll discover that nobody gives you anything. You've got to pay them.

Any surplus left over is yours, and yes, you did build that.

Any failure (and 80% of businesses fail within 5 years) you own the failure and its debts, too. The people who you paid for their services, you still owe any unpaid debt to them.

[autoexec]

> If you ever open a business, you'll discover that nobody gives you anything.

You'll also discover that you couldn't have done any of it alone. That your business would have been impossible without your education, which involved countless others, or the roads and bridges built by others, or the internet which was built by others, or the investors and banks who gave you the money to get your business started which were built by others. Even the things you paid for directly and upfront, but which your business absolutely depended on were built by someone else and any success you have would not have been possible if they hadn't done all the work needed to get to where they could provide you with what your business needed from them.

That's the point. Nobody does it alone, because that would be impossible. As the man said "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

That also means we fail together too. If you borrow a bunch of money to start a business and can't pay it back, that burden isn't just on you. The employees who depended on your business for their income also carry some of the burden of your failure. The customers who depended on you are also impacted. At a larger scale, when a business fails, we all lose out on what could have been if it hadn't. Our economy loses diversity. Most new businesses will fail, but the failures are never just about one person either. In fact, many times the things others have built, including the environment a business operates in, are a direct cause of that business failing.

[WalterBright]

And yet millions of others got an education, roads, internet, etc., and went nowhere.

Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either. You have to pay the loan back, with interest.

BTW, employee back wages have first dibs on your assets should you declare bankruptcy. The back wages won't be much, anyway, as the law is pretty specific that a business cannot be late on payday.

[autoexec]

> And yet millions of others got an education, roads, internet, etc., and went nowhere.

And millions of others are highly skilled, talented, intelligent, hardworking, and creative, but don't all find success.

This is why luck plays a massive role in the success of any business. That doesn't mean things like skills and initiative aren't important, or that people can't shift the odds in their favor (see for example https://fictivekin.github.io/pmarchive-jekyll/luck_and_the_e...) but ultimately, some people who should succeed don't because they were unlucky and others who do succeed would have failed if things entirely out of their control just happened to go differently.

> Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either.

Banks and investors give you money, with the expectation that they'll profit by doing so, but more to the point they give you opportunity. Plenty of people get turned away by banks and investors and if they manage to pull enough money together to get started they can still succeed, but others fail because without that opportunity given to them, they couldn't even get things off the ground.

Employees lose a lot more when their job is lost than just the wages they are owed (which they also don't always get) especially the ones who took more risky forms of compensation, but even outside the realm of compensation there are costs.

[WalterBright]

I'm curious how far you want to go with "you didn't build that". How about taking away the Beatles' success because they didn't make their own guitars? How about taking away gold medals from Olympic athletes? How about telling Picasso he didn't paint that? How about taking away the Oscars from actors because it was all other people? Maybe take away Hamilton's F1 World Championships?

Isn't the success of those people so unfair and undeserved?

If you paid a contractor to remodel your bathroom, and then sold your house for a higher price, is the contractor entitled to a piece of that action?