Re:Polio Is on the Brink of Eradication
by mptest on Thursday November 23, 2023 @07:47PM
(#38399558)
This notion that medical inventions are the benevolent gift of billionaires' ability to accumulate wealth is just wrong. What medical advances were made by the process you imagine in this comment? Maybe if brian johnson's blood magic from his son works I'll cede a single point here.
Science is a communal, collective effort, more evidently than anything else I can think of. To need to say that here of all places is really unfortunate
To try and act like taxing the rich is incompatible with medical advancement is just wrong. In the 50's and 60's we still made advancements and google the top marginal tax rate then. Do you think research would even slow down if rich people were capped at 999m? Seriously?
> This notion that medical inventions are the benevolent gift of billionaires' ability to accumulate wealth is just wrong.
No one said that. We are saying that billionaires do NOT do that, and because they don't, they are flaming idiots. Literally killing their own children, and often hastening their own personal deaths.
And they want to stay healthy and live long, also like the rest of us.
It means it is in their own selfish interest to invest loads of money into health, because that is what will help them achieve that goal.
But again, their body is much like our bodies, so every advance in medicine that can help them live longer will ultimately help us live longer. Maybe at first, only the wealthy will be able to get these state of the art treatment, but processes will improve, patents will expire, and sooner or later, they will be available to all of us.
This is one instance where there is no real need to "tax the rich", research is good for all of mankind, the rich are not taking away knowledge from the poor. This is in contrast to natural resources, like land. If the rich want to build their manor on some good spot, the poor that live there will have to leave. But if a cancer treatment is found for the rich, it will not take away a cancer treatment for the poor, in fact, that's the opposite, as it is likely that a few years after, the poor will also get the rich treatment.