This thinking is so poisonous and destructive and pervasive that I'm starting to wonder if it is either due to some natural law of human nature or some grand conspiracy to destroy modern society. Businesses are not built on the charity of the "system". Everyone is compensated in the building of a business, in exactly the amounts they demand to be compensated. The government gets its taxes, the employees get their salaries and benefits, the shareholders get their equity, and the founder(s) get(s) the rest. At that point, everyone is squared. Risk is appropriately rewarded, and risk is an absolute requirement if you want great things to happen.

From where does the business get the college-educated workforce so that it can be viable in the first place?

The answer is that hundreds of years of prosperity has created a system where enough people are middle class, value education, foster happy and curious children that don't need to work, and can send them off to college for an education because they don't need to enter the labour force until they're twenty-something.

We stand on the shoulders of giants in many, many, many ways.

That's insanity. Businesses pay more for college educated employees exactly because they are worth more, and in doing so they are "paying their fair share". It's not like these college educated employees are donating the extra money they should be making to the companies they work for. They demand higher salaries and companies often pay them. Again, everybody is square in the deal.

It would be just as insane for me to suggest that no individual is entitled to the money they earn because without all the private companies out there they wouldn't have all the tools and services required to achieve that success. Therefore, businesses are entitled to their labor for discounted rates or even for free.

Only if you take the surrounding system as given.

The original question was this:

> Put another way, if you founded a company, created thousands of jobs for families and individuals, and made a fortune, why should the state be the one who decides what happens with your money?

And the answer is that the state gets to decide what happens with the money, because if not for people banding together into nations, creating a state, taxing people, and using those taxes to enrich their nation over centuries, eventually reaching a state where a large part of a continent on this planet is occupied by some 300 million people, speaking the same language, using the same currency, having computers, wanting to connect, and therefore creating a niche for a social network to grow so big that its founder could employ thousands of people and amass a fortune.

No deal is ever squared in our society. We are continuously using the amassed production of the past, and paying it forward.

> This thinking is so poisonous and destructive and pervasive that I'm starting to wonder if it is either due to some natural law of human nature or some grand conspiracy to destroy modern society.

You have it backwards. If modern society is destroyed, it would prove the point, because we wouldn't have twenty-something computer-whiz billionaires for a very long time, not until we've rebuilt all of this again.

I didn't say they were built on the charity of the system, just that they were built using the system.

You act like the first 50 employees of your stupid app company aren't taking a risk too. But they get 0.01%, while the founders get...? Fairly early on, you literally don't have enough time in a day to do it all yourself, even if you wanted to, so you're quite literally taking credit for more risk than you were actually able to take.

Considering Paul Graham's essay about how most of the work is ahead of you even when you start adding employees, how is the risk so skewed towards initial conditions versus the long path ahead?

This toxic thinking that a twentysomething takes more risk by trying to start his own company while early in his career deserves orders of magnitude better compensation for the risk he took, over many career people that will have to be persuaded to risk their career and reputations on this new company, who have families, mortgages, and serious obligations to others?

He really took 1,000x more risk? Bullshit dude.

The system was built for us all to use.

You could argue that they owe a moral debt to the rest of us ("give back"), but they are filling that in the form charitable works. Much like how I chose to give back with volunteer works, instead of just paying more taxes.

I don't think you can claim the rest of us actually have license to their gains, just because they built their empire on top of the very same system the rest of us are also leveraging. Unless you want to claim everyone has license to all your gains too.

Besides, the reason we build roads and such is because we benefit from the thriving economy that is built on top of them. It's not just about "I want a road for me to drive on". We build them to be used, and to reap the greater social benefit of their use.

Now, if Mr. Billionaire was squandering the system for personal gain (example: horribly inefficient bitcoin mining with CPUs when the government is paying the electricity) that would be a different story.

So a college kid "uses the system", that system being the college, and by your logic they should be required to donate a certain percentage of their future earnings back to the college they went to because without that system they wouldn't have achieved their success?

That of course would be insanity. The college and the student already agreed upon a price the student should pay for their education, and when they graduate and the bills are paid, everyone is square. Companies within the larger systems in place in our country are no different. They pay money to file with the state, they pay taxes on all their profits, they pay payroll taxes which means they have to compensate their employees higher than they might otherwise, they pay regulation taxes, environmental taxes, etc. But most importantly, they pay people to work, which to me is exactly what they should be doing. By paying people for their labor, companies are paying for the system that provided for those people.

> This toxic thinking that a twentysomething takes more risk by trying to start his own company while early in his career deserves orders of magnitude better compensation for the risk he took, over many career people that will have to be persuaded to risk their career and reputations on this new company, who have families, mortgages, and serious obligations to others?

It sounds so easy from your armchair, doesn't it? When it's not your future on the line. When it's not you that has to bear the full brunt of failure if you don't succeed.

If Zuckerberg hadn't taken the risk to drop out of a highly prestigious school, from which he could have leveraged to land any number of low risk, highly lucrative jobs, to create Facebook, then 10s of thousands of high paying jobs wouldn't exist today. That kind of risk deserves a great reward, and wouldn't you know it, Zuckerberg is every bit as interested in the general welfare of his fellow humans as the rest of us are.

> You act like the first 50 employees of your stupid app company aren't taking a risk too. But they get 0.01%, while the founders get...? Fairly early on, you literally don't have enough time in a day to do it all yourself, even if you wanted to, so you're quite literally taking credit for more risk than you were actually able to take.

They are taking guaranteed salary and benefits and a little bit of equity, too. They understand exactly the amount of risk they took on and if they don't they're incredibly naive. If they were to offer their services for no compensation then they would absolutely deserve more equity. But if they only do so after it's clear the company is well on its way to being successful then how does that represent any risk whatsoever? Where were they when nobody believed in the company and the founders were pumping in their own savings and taking no salary whatsoever? Until you've gone through that, you can't understand what the risk is truly all about.

> Considering Paul Graham's essay about how most of the work is ahead of you even when you start adding employees, how is the risk so skewed towards initial conditions versus the long path ahead?

Sure, most of the work is ahead of you, but that work is done by people who get guaranteed salaries and benefits and who can simply find a new job if the company goes south (with unemployment benefits waiting to soften the blow). People flock to successful companies because they are often too risk-averse to start their own, but just because they do good work doesn't mean they are somehow entitled to the equity of a company, especially if they're receiving industry standard compensation for their efforts.

No, they are compensated in what is agreed to by both sides - which is not necessarily fair or representative of the part they played in building the business.

Yes, and if they were not made better off by it they would have never agreed to it.

>which is not necessarily fair or representative of the part they played in building the business.

No one is compensated based on what percentage they contribute to building a business or product. That is referred to the labor theory of value and it has been disproven.

As for fair, you tell me what fair is.

Yes, they are; especially when they accept public benefits, for instance, in the form of liability-shielded, government-created business structures, including the corporation, LLC, LLP, LLLP, and similar forms.

>disproportionately rewards "you" over the network that actually did much of the heavy lifting

You seem to advocate the labor theory of value which is a demonstrably false theory.

I don't understand why people confuse this so much. It's not "should I pay this $100 in taxes or donate it?". It's "Should I pay this $100 in taxes or donate the $300 I made that the tax is for?".

Why does everyone make it sound like you can choose whether to pay taxes or donate? It's "pay taxes or donate 3-4x that amount".

It's not like the government confiscates 100% of wealthy people's money as soon as they try to do good, it just taxes it like it does for mere mortals, whenever it changes hands. Using a legal construct to avoid personal tax liability, is quite literally depriving the government of funds it would otherwise be entitled to.

I think both sides of this debate have legitimate viewpoints, but I personally have a problem with the excessive opportunities given to the wealthy to avoid contributing to the funding of our shared system of governance and infrastructure.

Historically, they've never had it this good both tax-wise and income-wise, and to cry victim is in poor taste.

https://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Other-Non-Profit...

Two major errors in only seven words:

1: 501c4s are not "aka SuperPACs". Some SuperPACs are 501c4s, and some 501c4s are SuperPACs, but the things are neither equivalent (which is what "aka" ["also known as"] means) nor is either a subset of the other; there are 501c4s that are not SuperPACs, and SuperPACs that are not 501c4s (527s are less restricted than 501c4s in operations and historically more common for SuperPACs, 501c4s are adopted by some because, while more restricted in operation, they are able to keep donor lists secret while 527s are required to disclose donor lists.)

2: 501c4s (and 527s, for that matter) are tax-exempt non-profits, but not charities (charities are 501c3s, which in addition to being tax-exempt feature tax-deductibility of donations for donors; non-charity tax-exempt nonprofits do not feature deductibility of donations.)

But this is what inevitably happens in public choice as a state expands. Once you delegate all regulatory rights to a central exogenous body, it will be exploited by elites and a symbiotic relationship will form as the state develops special interests of its own.

Hence the need for extensive decentralization, and yes, individualism.

This has two obvious failure modes: it can decay into warlordism, and the member communities can hate each other passionately enough to go to war. (So federalism is a non-starter for the US at the present day.)

Of course, if the poster here didn't mean by federalism what I guessed that it means, the above is irrelevant.

it's in the constitution, the 10th amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.")

The individual states are still allowed to administer themselves in uninteresting and uncontroversial areas, but they have no right to legalize dueling, or ban guns, or write their own marriage laws, or set up a state religion, or reorganize themselves as anti-clerical theocracies -- matters where a federal government would presumably let them do as they pleased. (See what I mean about parts of the federation coming to hate each other enough to go to war?)

They don't. Only the state can legally pull a gun on you and force you to do things or go to jail.

Why does anyone else?