Enough with the blanket statements, Sure bill gates is ok but just yesterday the front page had a story of the Sackler family and how they amassed billions by pumping the united states with opiates. They literally killed thousands and ruined the lives of millions, while destroying American society. Billionaries are people, some evil some good.
Also, the point of a government is to provide for it's citizens (with taxes) not to hope that in a 100years we can settle on other planets. And btw, in that scenario we would not be the ones who end up on Elysium. As much as SV programmers like to think they can be part the billionaire class you are not and will never be an oligarch.
I this this is objectively incorrect for the USA.
I also thought the demand was a result of political policies that didn’t provide support for communities who were impoverished by the globalization of manufacturing and other industries.
Yes, the Sackler’s profited, and were irredeemably bad actors in this, but they are just one part of the story.
Isn't this a sort of oxymoron? The taxes come from other citizens. The ones who are paying a majority of the taxes are not provided for by the government. Government should seek to provide everyone equal protection of their rights.
Who knows how many other good things he's delayed indirectly because he delayed the internet so much?
You could just as easily say that Gates advanced the progress of the internet by driving the price of PCs down so that more people owned them.
It’s also reasonable to say that these decisions were a major reason why Microsoft lost their dominant position.
Gates is rich, but he lost his power over the software industry over this.
I would rather have the sackler family than the drug cartels.
You believe the point of govt is to provide for its citizens, that doesnt make it a fact.
Others believe the point of government is to protect us from each other while letting us make personal choices for good or ill.
This argument really doesn't hold water.
For a start it implies that becoming a multi-planet species would be impossible without Musk or Bezos holding vast personal wealth. There is no reason to believe that.[1]
It also implies that Bezos couldn't possibly fund Blue Origin if he was worth (say) a paltry $100 billion, instead of his current $190 billion.
[1] You could, for example, use some of the money from a "billionaire tax" to fund NASA.
There is 50+ years of evidence that we will not become multi-planetary without private funding. The only reason NASA was funded enough to get to the moon in the first place was because of the cold war. Very unlikely it would have happened otherwise.
It's ridiculous you could even bring up the cold war without acknowledging the major scientific and engineering breakthroughs done by communist societies.
I'd say there's significant argument that it is indeed impossible. Democratic governments as a rule do optimize for cost where currency is created by fiat. Private capital generally does in order to stay in business and not go bankrupt. There's tons of recent evidence showing that existing space business is incredibly inefficient in cost.
Alternatively, you could allow billionaires to donate some of their billions, untaxed, into non-profits which they control and which have humanity-benefiting goals like space colonisation or clean energy or medical programs.
There could be problems, however, with these non-profits hoarding vast amounts of resources long after the billionaire dies, at which point a wealth tax on the non-profit's unused assets might make sense.
he doesn't pay income tax cuz he usually have income, no salary. he just has stock, and he lives off debt against the stock. he will be forced to sell stock to pay a wealth tax. he will have less control over his companies.
Presidents come to office, scrap the previous adminstration's space goals, create their own new goals and then their's are scrapped by the next admin before they come to fruition. It takes more than 8 years (the max a president can serve) to really follow through on an ambitious vision for space.
Billionaires can stick with it longer.
George HW Bush wanted to go Mars then scrapped it when he got the price tag. In 04, George W Bush wanted to go to the moon by 2020. Obama scrapped the moon 2020 plan and planned to go to Mars by 2030. Trump is sending them back to the moon then Mars.
Bezos may be contributing to the privatization of space, but he's doing it by exploiting the ones who keep the merchandise flowing through the cash cow. 19th century robber barons honed some of that machinery, Amazon has capitalized on and honed to a fine sharpness that blade.
The US was founded with an extreme class system -- slavery, and aristocratic-only male-only voting. The founders judgement is not sacrosanct.
The US is the story of a country that is constantly struggling to live up to its founding ideology. Slavery was widespread globally at that time, and ended up fighting its most deadly war to end it. Over time its flaws were sought out and eradicated to give way to the most prosperous and free country in human history, all within a couple hundred years.
The founders were not perfect (no one is), but did realize the evils of slavery and some did end up releasing their slaves.
The comparison to aristocracy is absurd. The US was founded abolishing the class system because the wanted equal opportunity, not equal outcome.