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A comment on The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code. Parent comment

Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by ryandrake on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:02PM (#47915730)
When it comes to what actually matters, people's standards of living, what matters most is percentages, which are zero sum. In a simplified economy where 10 people have $100 each, everyone is worth 10% of the economy, have about equal buying power, equal standards of living, equal political power, and so on.

If one of those people suddenly "creates wealth" and now has $100,000, then the average value of the dollar goes down and the cost of everything goes up. Person X can trivially afford the increase, but the other nine now have lower buying power, lower standards of living, and the $100,000 now can exert coercive control over those with less.

We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by WalterBright on Sunday April 26, 2026 @10:39PM (#47917137)
> We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.

I'll just say that every country that decided to get rid of its wealthy people wound up poorer, a lot poorer.

For a specific example, Massachusetts has a luxury yacht industry. The government decided that they wanted to tax the wealthy, and slapped a hefty tax on yachts. The billionaires simply took their yacht buying elsewhere, and the yacht industry collapsed, costing thousands of highly paid jobs. The government rescinded the tax.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by ryandrake on Monday April 27, 2026 @09:51AM (#47921561)
> I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.

You have ~40 responses in this thread in defense of billionaires, not sure which one exactly you're talking about.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by WalterBright on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @01:57AM (#47930863)
See my posts saying that wealthy people create wealth, they do not transfer it. The transfer theory is the zero sum theory.
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