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I happen to think that the people who make their money by making and selling things are for the most part a minority these days amongst those with any amount of money and position.

That is, people who would be willing to spend the time and energy actually building a business, focusing on product development, and competing in a relatively open market on cost and quality of product or service, are in a dwindling minority.  Business these days is more and more about breaking the market and setting up rent-extraction services, and doing everything possible to avoid any sort of honest competition.

I'm not actually anti-capitalist, in I do think that private enterprise which competes in a regulated marketplace on price and quality is something that is worthwhile and produces value.  However, I also think that there's a tendency common to pretty much all human society for people at a certain level of wealth and power to get lazy.  Being a capitalist is hard work if you do it right, even at the top.  Even serious investors, like Warren Buffet, work their asses off.  I don't really mind people like that at all.  I don't begrudge them their wealth and their status.

My problem is not with them so much, as with the tendency of their compatriots to take the lazy way out.  Break the marketplace, establish monopolies, sweat the workers, and let the system run itself.  You don't have to compete if people have no choice but to buy your product, after all.  You don't have to compete if you can just print money.  And their kids are even worse - they grow up thinking they are naturally entitled to be rich and powerful, and that they deserve it because they really are smarter and harder working than the normal people.  It's the second and third generations that break the system, because they didn't build it, they don't understand it, and they're stupid little entitled brats.

Let a real industrialist or entrepreneur build their empire and reap their horde, within some reasonable limit.  But what they build dies with them, and their kids need to get a job just like anyone else.

by Zwackus on Fri Aug 23rd, 2013 at 08:13:50 AM EST
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