Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kagakuninja 867 days ago
>Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an already hard problem and will reduce the number of such things that get started.

Because governments can't fund projects?

Not sure what you are arguing for, but IMO there is this idea of the "great men" who build cool things like Space-X. So we should let the wealthy keep their great wealth so that we get more companies like Space-X.

Except what we really get is more corporate looting, oppression and monopoly, plus the hyper-wealthy having excessive influence over government.

If the wealth is spread around, and we no longer have to be wage slaves our whole lives, then collectives of like-minded people could band together and build cool things. We do see that in the open-source world, but most contributors are not earning money they need to pay bills.

1 comments

I very specifically said that the government should fund projects and personally I think it should fund more. But they can't do everything and they won't always have the foresight to fund everything worth funding.

I am arguing that more-or-less randomly allocating wealth to individuals to then re-allocate will produce better results and the larger number of individuals, above a certain amount of wealth necessary for grand projects, the better. I think we are better off when we have a diversity of directions in funding grand projects. There is a very real cap on how much money is actually necessary for great projects. No one needs 100 billion dollars to do any particular thing. Idk where the line is, probably the high hundred millions or low billions?

We also really need better wealth distribution in the middle too, but the main post's assertion is literally "no rich people" so I'm arguing against that because private investment has created an incredible amount of the good things we enjoy every day. I'm not talking about the "great men" I'm talking about boring people writing checks for new companies that they think sound cool.