A very wonderful read. I have many immigrant friends who have fled various authoritarian prison-nations ... Vietnam, Iran, China, etc. I listen to their stories, and marvel that my fellow countrymen can't see the danger of authoritarian tools such as the focus on economic inequality.
I'm quite amazed at the liberally educated—Nassem Taleb…
A very wonderful read. I have many immigrant friends who have fled various authoritarian prison-nations ... Vietnam, Iran, China, etc. I listen to their stories, and marvel that my fellow countrymen can't see the danger of authoritarian tools such as the focus on economic inequality.
I'm quite amazed at the liberally educated—Nassem Taleb's IYI—who fail to realize our economic inequality is a symptom of our success; that this symptom is instead a sign of liberty. As my friends—refugees from Communist Vietnam—relate, in Vietnam anyone can have a coffee cart. But if someone were to open a coffee shop, the corrupt government officials want a cut ... a piece of ownership. Another friend related how his father-in-law tried to open a cement block making plant. The government forcibly took partial ownership. At every stage of growth the government took more ownership of the cement block plant. Finally the father-in-law no longer controlled his own small cement block plant. He gave it all to the government, lost his investment, and the corrupt officials sold it all off for scrap. You'll hear the same stories out of Venezuela, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The whole economies and societies suffer the loss. One family has lost it's investment, the local economy lost jobs, the region lost access to building materials.
The most amazing failing I see in the very well educated IYI set, is their misunderstanding of the quantification of business ownership. The fact that Jeff Bezos' company is worth some big billions of dollars, and Jeff's controlling share is likewise worth some big billions of dollars doesn't equate to Jeff having a mountain of dollars sitting in a basement vault ala Ocean's Eleven. Yes, Jeff could be forced out of his role as CEO, his controlling interest in his company could be taxed away ... but does that put a single penny into anyone else's hands? No, the government will slurp those funds away, control of Amazon will transfer to the hands of someone far less capable—Does anyone remember Scully and Apple Computer ... Anyone? For those who don't know that history, Steve Jobs handed the CEO position of Apple Computer to John Scully. It ended with Steve Jobs fired, Apple Computer in bankruptcy, thousands of people laid off; their homes lost to default; marriages broken; families destroyed. Steve Jobs bought Apple back out of bankruptcy and rebuilt it even better than it was. The moral of the story, is that only a very few people are capable of running a company—we identify them by their success. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple Computer from a garage hobby into the most innovative company ever. Only someone of the calibre of Steve Jobs is capable of running this kind of company. If your heavy handed Maoism wrests away the control of a company, it is likely to fail. Again, the economic failure of a company involves the economic failure of each and every employee and their families as well. As I said before, the rank and file—suddenly disemployed—will suffer far more-so than the C-suite. That is the awful results of your socialism, reducing the livelihood of everyone down to equality in poverty.
The overeducated—sit, as Orwell says concerning Men With No Chests—unable to connect the cerebral world with the physical world. Adopting the catchy phrase of the permanently disaffected which when enacted leads a prosperous country to ruin. Look at Zimbabwe, Venezuela, *Vietnam.
* Vietnam was a food exporter all through the war. Only after the Communists took over did food production fall so low that the government ordered every family to begin farming. Later anti-Maoist reforms increased food production.
A very wonderful read. I have many immigrant friends who have fled various authoritarian prison-nations ... Vietnam, Iran, China, etc. I listen to their stories, and marvel that my fellow countrymen can't see the danger of authoritarian tools such as the focus on economic inequality.
I'm quite amazed at the liberally educated—Nassem Taleb's IYI—who fail to realize our economic inequality is a symptom of our success; that this symptom is instead a sign of liberty. As my friends—refugees from Communist Vietnam—relate, in Vietnam anyone can have a coffee cart. But if someone were to open a coffee shop, the corrupt government officials want a cut ... a piece of ownership. Another friend related how his father-in-law tried to open a cement block making plant. The government forcibly took partial ownership. At every stage of growth the government took more ownership of the cement block plant. Finally the father-in-law no longer controlled his own small cement block plant. He gave it all to the government, lost his investment, and the corrupt officials sold it all off for scrap. You'll hear the same stories out of Venezuela, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The whole economies and societies suffer the loss. One family has lost it's investment, the local economy lost jobs, the region lost access to building materials.
The most amazing failing I see in the very well educated IYI set, is their misunderstanding of the quantification of business ownership. The fact that Jeff Bezos' company is worth some big billions of dollars, and Jeff's controlling share is likewise worth some big billions of dollars doesn't equate to Jeff having a mountain of dollars sitting in a basement vault ala Ocean's Eleven. Yes, Jeff could be forced out of his role as CEO, his controlling interest in his company could be taxed away ... but does that put a single penny into anyone else's hands? No, the government will slurp those funds away, control of Amazon will transfer to the hands of someone far less capable—Does anyone remember Scully and Apple Computer ... Anyone? For those who don't know that history, Steve Jobs handed the CEO position of Apple Computer to John Scully. It ended with Steve Jobs fired, Apple Computer in bankruptcy, thousands of people laid off; their homes lost to default; marriages broken; families destroyed. Steve Jobs bought Apple back out of bankruptcy and rebuilt it even better than it was. The moral of the story, is that only a very few people are capable of running a company—we identify them by their success. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple Computer from a garage hobby into the most innovative company ever. Only someone of the calibre of Steve Jobs is capable of running this kind of company. If your heavy handed Maoism wrests away the control of a company, it is likely to fail. Again, the economic failure of a company involves the economic failure of each and every employee and their families as well. As I said before, the rank and file—suddenly disemployed—will suffer far more-so than the C-suite. That is the awful results of your socialism, reducing the livelihood of everyone down to equality in poverty.
The overeducated—sit, as Orwell says concerning Men With No Chests—unable to connect the cerebral world with the physical world. Adopting the catchy phrase of the permanently disaffected which when enacted leads a prosperous country to ruin. Look at Zimbabwe, Venezuela, *Vietnam.
* Vietnam was a food exporter all through the war. Only after the Communists took over did food production fall so low that the government ordered every family to begin farming. Later anti-Maoist reforms increased food production.
Atlas Shrugged...