Comment by WalterBright
1 year ago
Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created.
When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.
That's why I prefaced it with "free market".
1 year ago
Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created.
When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.
That's why I prefaced it with "free market".
Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened.
Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.
Maybe both.
Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.
We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.
Bernie Madoff defrauded people by selling them fake investments.
Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.
Excluding fraud, theft, and so forth, just by definition, means we're talking about a utopia. It's not a system, it's some beautiful subset of what's really going on. The subset would have to be carefully selected, using information we don't actually have until (maybe) much later. Maybe never.
This 'free market' is a bit like clean matter-antimatter power stations. They sound like a great idea. We could build them if we knew how.
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