Good. If you look at the people who are ultra rich they ultimately seem incredibly unhappy, the richest people in the world have more than they could ever use and still aren't satisfied. This incredible amount of wealth and power comes at a massive societal cost and it isn't even helping the lives of the handful of people who are getting it.
Noone needs to be so rich they can casually biy whole governments. Rich enough to never work another day if they don't want to is plenty. Producing multibillionares is not a good thing
> What about producing people who create products so loved that the people give them billions of dollars?
I think we're in full agreement here. Profit from sales should be distributed to the workers who created the products, who can in turn support businesses that are useful to them, who can in turn support business that are useful to them, and so on. It's the basis of a functioning market economy.
What breaks the system is allowing a tiny group of people to hoard majority of the "wealth" (which is just a social construct and requires cooperation from a willing society, or as it is today, cooperation from a propagandized, overworked, and exhausted society). This gives them unchecked power to dictate what the rest of society does in terms of labour, research, politics, etc.
> The "nobody needs..." way of thinking is very Soviet.
Here's the difference between computers in pockets and billionaires.
If we made a rule that prohibited computers in pockets (I assume smartphones count as computers in pockets) it would have a noticeable affect on peoples lives. Those devices do a lot of very useful things, and greatly reduced the amount of stuff we have to carry around. (Although they do have a downside, such as people getting addicted to social media or exploitive games).
If we made a rule that made it harder and harder to accumulate money the more you have over maybe 10 billion it would not have much of an affect. The people who create products that can make billions of dollars are almost always driven by creative urges, not urges to add another $10 billion to the $100 billion or whatever that they already have.
And there are others, but not ultra young ones actually.
But why would it be bad if the goal of a country is to raise a little the wealth of everyone instead of a lot the wealth of very few ? A country is succesful not by the number of billionaires but by quite a lot of other criterias.
And yet from some of the HN comments I've seen on this topic it seems that quite a few of the Americans are stockholm syndromed to the point that if you do not want to benefit the ultra rich at the expense of regular people by removing their healthcare, vacations, employee safety and protection rights, ability to unionize, and basically by doing all you can to milk the average worker for your own gain, then you're stupid, and they demean EU by constantly bringing up the tired trope of us not having some mega billion valuation companies here because ... our people have rights ... and so no law-breaking/lobbying silicon valley god wants to come here.
And they say this seemingly without realizing that yes, that is exactly by design. This is what we want. Keep your mega wealthy and 3rd world life quality, and we'll here be poor, but can at least attend our children being born without getting fired for it, and giving our mothers a year or more of paid maternity leave, among many many other things we value a hell of a lot more than making our billionaires richer.
EU citizens lifespan is also (very roughly) a few years more than us citizens.
Is the purpose of life living a happier, fuller life or being richer? I'd rather take the former than the latter.
On a more serious approach, I guess millionaires in usa will fare better than poor Americans, but at least in Europe you will still have access to some sort of safety net when things get rough. As imperfect as eu might be, I do not get why the hatred is so strong (especially for some libertarian or similar breeds here on hackernews, the thread on eurollm had quite strong opinions on both sides)
