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Notes -
And, importantly, there's a distinction in how you get there and what the side effects are. In a capitalist system, the way to become a billionaire is to create or invest early in a billion dollar company. In a capitalist system with no holes or exploits, this means you generate multiple billions of wealth in the economy and extract a fraction of that as profit for yourself. In a capitalist system with holes and exploits that usually involves a combination of wealth creation, rent-seeking, and market capture. But it's still almost always positive sum. The world is so much better because Amazon exists than it was before it did.
Government bureaucrats mostly don't create wealth, they suckle on the teat of the wealth creators and enrich themselves off someone else's work. Theoretically there could be exceptions, if one has an especially important job and creates especially efficient legislation or regulations that smooth things over for everyone else as individuals they can do more good. But there aren't capitalist feedback loops, so there's nothing causing the better ones to be richer than the worse ones. Giving them more money and power might incentivize more people to want to be them, but that doesn't create more wealth the way incentivizing more people to want to be tech founders does. It just creates more competition to suck wealth that other people created.
Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos shouldn't be billionaires because they're good people. They should be billionaires because they reached into the void and pulled out billions of dollars of wealth and shared some of it with us, and kept some of it for themselves. They did that, who are you to confiscate it from them? And if you do, who else is going to risk reaching into the void when they could just become a confiscator instead and do the safer job of reaching into wallets?
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