>Period. That's it, and it's inarguable.

No it's not, it's actually extremely easy to prove wrong: J.K. Rowling.

She ran the printing press and picked the camera lenses and stacked the books by the cash register and booked her own press interviews? Also who taught all the kids to read?

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HDThoreaun 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Why does she have to control the entire vertical process to earn a billion dollars? She sold her work and got paid a billion dollars for it. Who did she exploit? In what way were her earnings unearned?

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CPLX 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s just back to my original point. Which was that every billion dollar enterprise is a collective or team effort and the only argument is about how the results get allocated.

Which is, as I pointed out, inarguable. No one is spawned alone in the woods to start their adventure independently of the society they are in.

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HDThoreaun 6 hours ago | parent [-]

PG says this in his post though. He says the people working for the startup whose founder he talked to are being compensated fairly and properly. To claim his post is a misreading you have to claim every billionaire wouldnt be a billionaire if resources were allocated correctly.

	▲	CPLX 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> fairly and properly He takes that as a given but this is, in fact, the argument and you can't wave it away. By doing so he's being disingenuous. The argument here is about who gets what. And the startup founder and its employees are not the only participants in the economy. The revenue flowing in to his hypothetical startup is exogenous to the startup so you have to talk about where it's coming from, who's affected, and how that fits in with policy goals. For an extreme but accurate thought experiment, imagine concluding your analysis of FTX by noting that their employees were "fairly and properly" paid and then moving on.