Other than data centers being the bogeyman du jour, why isn't the bill written more generally to address potential impacts of any large new business that is anticipated to create effects like noise, pollution, infrastructure requirements, etc.
It's not already required for proposed businesses to address these issues?
Not really the point. Should we have separate laws for stealing from grocery stores, electronics stores and drug stores because they have different characteristics?
It's exactly the point! Data Centers have a unique capability to damage property, society and the environment.
A new aluminum smelter, dirty as they are, wont double your electric bill and will employ far more people than a datacenter (other than ex-marines w/ shoot to kill orders, who works there?)
I'm in agreement with you on the jobs .. but power draw wise??
An aluminium smelter uses an immense amount of electricity, requiring about 14,000 kWh per metric ton of aluminium produced. Because it takes so much power—roughly equivalent to powering a mid-sized city like Nashville or Boston—electricity can make up to 40% of the total production cost.
That's quoted from a google AI summary query, sure - but I've had family members work the S.Australian smelters and they're beasts for power consumption.
My dad's first job as an ECE was getting power for an Al smelter. Im quite aware of Al smelters.
I chose it as an example because they're crazy power hungry. The other classical examples of high electrical use are NH3 fertilizer plants.
But! We're not building hundreds of Al smelters all across the country. Nor are we building hundreds of NH3 plants.
We should be, seeing how a significant amount of our Al and NH3 is locked in the ME, but alas; we've decided to keep a structural, supply-side inflation that will devastate any family making less than $400k rather than divert capital from the surveillance state and chat bots.
At most, there's a market for two Al and NH3 plants in the country potentially employing thousands of lower middle class folks.
Well, let's use discernment. Let's also add NH3 plants since those are also electricity hogs.
1. There's no VC distorted market building hundreds of them. At most two Al or NH3 will ever be built again in this country.
2. We need Al and NH3 in a way that we dont need data centers. Most of the protein in your body comes from synthetic NH3. Al has slashed CO2 emissions in industry.
There's a Middle Eastern fertilizer and Al crisis that's going to devastate our economies. Al and NH3 should have been on-shored 20 years ago.
3. Its already impossible to build NH3 or Al plants in NY due to other regulatory laws that target Al and NH3.
So, NY state in its (/s) infinite wisdom (/s) has realized that New Yorkers need to eat more than it needs to feed a surveillance state.
That clears things up. You want to use the cudgel of the state's power regarding zoning issues to address ventures which you find morally objectionable in some way.
Other than your sanctimonious tone, did you have a point?
And your sanctimonious attitude is wrong. This isn't about morality. It's literally about economic devastation being caused by VC's using the violence of the state to eminent domain houses to make right away for power lines, inctease power prices, etc.
Of course, you don't believe corporate socialism is wrong, you just call it free market capitalism. Well go read Rothbard.
Power use might be high depending on configuration, but speed shouldn't be that slow using capacitors. Sufficiently strong pneumatics tend to require quite a bit of power too.
A general rule I used in industry was that on plant air @7-ish bar, it took at least 5 hp worth of compressor capacity do 1 hp worth of work at the end of the hose.... No biggie on a small scale.
You claimed that "polyp will very likely eventually become cancer". I don't think this is true, in general, for polyps even though some might become cancerous. The paper you provided is pretty dense, but it didn't see to me as though it is saying that polyps generally become cancerous.
It's an internet forum, I didn't claim anything. And your doctor isn't going to first biopsy just a little bit of a polyp to determine if it's the "bad" kind, he's going to remove all of it.
It's annoying pedantry, a distinction without a difference.
Oh FFS. The difference between polyps very likely becoming cancer and some polyps maybe becoming cancer is not pedantry. And it probably wouldn't be as annoying to you if you just said that you didn't know instead of attempting to dig deeper by providing a source that you either didn't read or didn't understand.
"In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."
Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.
"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers.
But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.
> But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange
Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.
Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.
Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.
Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?
Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"?
The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.
I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.
At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.
Then capitalism cannot exist and never has, because there is no such thing as something which produces wealth merely by possession. Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use. Without a use, there is no yield. Capital (in the sense of the monetary value of assets) is merely an index for the utility of assets in producing a yield. There is nothing special about the yield of capital; there is properly speaking no yield to capital at all, only a yield for the assets which the capital indexes. Entrepreneurs gain wealth by choosing which uses to put assets at their disposal. It is only when assets are put into production that they yield a profit or loss. And wealth accumulates only when there is sustainable profits. Mere posession would not involve exchange, let alone production, and therefore could not yield any profit. There is no "free" or "automatic" generation of income. It is the result of conscious activity on part of the owner, as is capital itself.
The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.
> Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use.
Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort and most importantly: the amount of money you can loan out (and make a profit from) is not limited by the number of hours in the day, and therefore owners can always out-compete laborers.
> The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets.
> Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort
Money is a medium of exchange. It is used by exchanging it for something else. A loan involves trading money in the present, which is more valuable, for money in the future. What produces value here is surrendering present goods indirectly through the intermediary of money. The creditor gives up consumption so that others can consume or produce earlier than they otherwise could have in absence of the loan. This is the value produced by loans in the eyes of the debtor.
> Now you're getting it!
Notice how any market automatically involves said accounting immediately when money is used. Your earlier insistence that markets and capitalism are distinct cannot be maintained.
I mean we don't really have any counter examples even China didn't really start advancing in any meaningful way until they started moving towards capitalism.
> The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system
> They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better.
Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.
Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty.
The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.
On the subject of straw men, there is no such thing as "unfettered capitalism." That is something you invented to support your argument.
Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyond your high-school years, as your account age suggests, this should be obvious.
Unsurprisingly, the most successful systems are those that have proven to be better at meeting human nature on its own terms. Hence the triumph of capitalism as it is practiced today, which for all its flaws has the advantage that you don't have threaten people at gunpoint to force them to engage in it.
For all of your rah-rah capitalist boosterism, you failed to address the actual content of my argument, which is that the reason during the last 50 years that the China has had decreasing poverty, while the US has had increasing poverty, has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with restrictions on capitalism (or their absence).
It evidently can be addressed here, as you yourself mentioned. No one has yet pointed out to me why my reading is "naive and frankly incorrect," so feel free to be the first.
All well and good but you still haven't addressed my point which is that China's reduction of poverty is due to its central control of wages, construction, and capital.
They had "central control of wages, construction, and capital" to a much higher degree before they started becoming capitalistic in 1976 and the poverty levels were much much worse and not going down. They only started going down once they embraced capitalism and started allowing private companies.
That is consistent with my earlier statement: capitalism creates wealth, but you need another system to distribute it fairly. It's crazy to think that capitalism alone will "raise all boats" when this has been shown to be untrue.
Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen?
Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.
If you keep increasing taxes and reward people that don't work by giving them free and easy wealth, the tax revenue will actually go down at some point instead of going up, leaving less to redistribute. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
> Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen?
That's one approach, but not the only one, to eliminating capitalism.
> Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.
So in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, when the highest marginal tax rate was around 90%, did people suddenly stop working? Or did the US enter its highest period of productivity and income equality?
This chart looks at the top 1%. This is intentionally deceptive. "The total national income share earned by the top 1% and top 0.1% in that era was far lower than it is now, and consequently, the income thresholds required for entry into the ranks of the top 1% or the top 0.1% were lower. By today’s standards, there were many fewer rich households in the 1950s than there are now—in fact, almost none. The rich people from the 1950s that Greenberg is comparing to the rich of today were what we would now call the upper middle class—thus, not an apples-to-apples comparison. Had there been any 2017-style rich people in those days, they would likely have faced an effective tax rate near that confiscatory statutory rate of 91%.... It’s not a coincidence that the rich are so much richer now than they were in the 50s: it’s precisely because effective tax rates on the rich have gone down so much that it’s worthwhile to become rich in the first place." [1]
Why is your article making claims that, while true, give a distorted view of 1950s tax policy? It's certainly possible that an organization called the "Tax Institute" has an agenda they are trying to push.
Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."
That's because your question is silly. I'll spell it out for you: Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist. Your failure to see beyond your immediate surroundings and ignoring the first sentence of my previous comment is perhaps the reason for your silly question.
> Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist
However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.
So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why.
Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?
Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious?
300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests.
Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?
The problem is that your proposed approach has been tried again and again and has failed every single time with disastrous consequences for several generations.
Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?
> Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work
You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.
My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.
That makes no sense because labor needs capital to take risks so they get salaries. For example new drug discoveries cost a lot of money and a huge percentage fail with big losses that go to paying labor but not eventually benefiting from it. Banning that model where capital is risked by passive investors would've meant far fewer life saving drugs being invented, literally making mankind worse off.
If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.
Before capital investment it was coercion, slavery or community building that made big projects possible. The first two were outlawed as they weren't needed under capitalism but were common in non capitalism like the gulags and Uyghur labor .
Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things, there's nothing stopping anyone.
Huh? You think that before investment, people didn't trade good and services of their own free will? You need to re-examine history. Commerce predates civilization.
If you think that slavery isn't needed under capitalism, how do you explain the extensive use of slavery under capitalism?
> Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things
That's true, and is completely irrelevant to our conversation, because we're not discussing volunteering, we're talking about the distribution of profit. If there is no profit, there is nothing to distribute.
You don't have to demonstrate this kind of ignorance of human history on main.
Aren't you embarrassed? Do you value knowledge even a little bit?
When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
Capitalism began when Thag, who was a good hunter, brought home two dinosaur steaks. His buddy Grog was a lousy hunter, but was good at making spears. Thag traded a dinosaur steak for a new spear.
First, pedantically, we did not share time with 'dinosaurs' in the sense you imply.
Secondly, pedantically, that kind of hunting was not the main source of calories for hunter-gatherers. It's more apt to imagine them as gatherers first and primarily.
Thirdly, and also pedantically, you are not describing the system of capitalism that I, and most educated people talk about when they use the word.
That system has only been with us in the main for, generously, 250 years.
Critically, Thag and Grog both own the means of production for their spears and 'steaks' respectively. The necessary abstractions for capital accumulation, debt, and private ownership simply do not exist.
Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.
> It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions.
I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you.
The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.
> Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.
Are you familiar with the idea of a thought-terminating cliche [1]?
You have given yourself permission to ignore everything associated with Marxism because you've been taught that it's "wrong." If you actually thought about your statement, you'd realize that you are quasi-intentionally dismissing ideas without consideration.
1. What does it mean for Marxism to have been "tried"? Do you consider the Soviet Union to be Marxist? I don't.
2. Even if Marxism had been "tried" and failed, so what? Do we dismiss capitalism because of failed capitalist states?
3. Even if Marxism in practice was futile, does that mean that very idea espoused by Marx is necessarily wrong? No, it does not. Newtonian physics is "wrong" in light of relativistics but there is still very much right about it.
The fact that some countries (mostly the political west) developed a wealthy middle class post WW2 was not due to capitalism but due to social democracy.
Capitalism by itself does not produce egalitarian wealthy society. The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.
There are plenty of capitalistic countries where most people are poor. In fact many of the as said Western countries has also high levels of poverty while running capitalism in the 1800 etc until post WW2 social democratic movements.
Once you dismantle those social democratic constructs such as labor unions and start shifting more power to the capital holders you'll see how the society splits apart to rich and poor. The rich use their wealth and power to rig the system to benefit themselves even more and become richer at the expense of everyone else. Ultimately they will remove democracy because functional real democracy is a threat to their wealth.
The middle class emerged in colonial America. During the 1800s, scores of millions of people came to the US with little more than a suitcase. They went into the middle class, and some into the wealthy. We know this because:
1. Average height increased throughout the 1800s
2. Life expectancy increased throughout the 1800s
3. Plenty of photos and paintings of towns that consist of middle class housing
> The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.
That's what Marx claimed. I've had many jobs. In none of them was I ever in conflict. It was a negotiated relationship, where I provided labor and expertise in exchange for money. I've also been a boss, and if you ever have been you'd know you had no power over your employees. They only work for you because they want to. When they stopped wanting to, they simply disappear, and there's not a thing I could do about it.
In the US, every worker has the power to walk away and start their own business. The wealthy in America did not come from wealthy immigrants, they came from poor immigrants.
Most employees have absolutely Zero leverage. Ask any Amazon warehouse worker how much liberties they have and how much in practice they can negotiate. Just because some employees have had some leverage doesn't change the underlying power dynamics between employers and employees. In fact we're now seeing this play out in software as well with the AI hype train and I expect a reality check to hit many people previously in their cushy office jobs.
They can walk away at any moment and there's absolutely nothing Amazon can do about it.
Amazon pays significantly above minimum wage. Why don't they pay minimum wage?
Amazon benefits to warehouse workers include heavily subsidized health care (starting at $5 per week), up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave, prepaid college tuition, and a 401(k) company match.
> Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.
No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.
The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.
"It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a third of your leg to become necrotic and fall off, but be glad for the two thirds that did not fall off!"
> > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.
> No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.
Are you toiling in the fields? It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."
> The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.
So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?
> It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."
The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.
Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more. That's how I got rich. But there's a limit to how rich I can get, because I have only one body and one mind and there are a finite number of hours in the day.
The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that. The result is eventually a winner-take-all economy, where the winners own an increasing amount of society and everyone else pays them to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it's feudelism, and is the eventual end state of capitalism.
You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.
> So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?
> The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that.
Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it.
> Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it
In order to risk one's own capital, one must first own capital. Today's working poor, just like the serfs of times gone by, have nothing to invest but their own labor. It's hard to build a business when you're fully occupied in working to buy food.
You've inadvertently pointed out the fundamental inequality of capitalism: in order to get the (potential) benefits of capital, you must first belong to the capitalist class.
It's interesting how when you talk to people who are vocally in favor of capitalism, they always turn out to be in favor of an imaginary version of capitalism where everybody is a small business owner, rather than in favor of how the system works in practice and the outcomes that it necessarily creates.
> You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.
You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks.
> The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.
I would love for things to be fair, but I grew up in the real world and learned that things weren't fair back when I was a kid in primary school.
Instead of lamenting about something that I can't control, I decided to focus my efforts on what I can control. Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.
Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair. You can spit into the wind, or you can set a sail.
> You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks.
I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write.
> Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair.
There is nothing wrong with greed or unfairness, to a degree. As I said in my previous comment, some personal characteristics will naturally lead to inequality of outcome. That's fine, because everyone is deriving profit from the (variable quality) work that they are personally able to produce. I would say that greed and unfairness are essential to any system of commerce, which I support.
Capitalism, on the other hand, allows inequality on a grand scale that necessarily results in a society that no longer rewards hard work: the lords own all property, everyone else works for them, and there is no way to achieve wealth competitive with that of a lord simply by labor. The laborers work to surive, and the owner class consumes all the benefits. This is the system that we spent a century of war fighting to end. It seems silly to go back to feudalism just to appease the modern-day lords.
> Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.
Who, do you suppose, am I tearing down? I want a society that rewards hard work. A system with no social mobility is not that system. I want people to improve themselves in order to make more money. What I don't want is a society where the owner class are able to be parasites on everyone else, producing no labor (physically or intellectually) but showing giant profit. The modern day US is increasingly distant from its much more socially mobile past, and it's only going to get worse.
I'm not saying that the current crop of billionaires haven't worked hard to get where they are. I am saying that their work is not proportional to their benefit, and at a certain point they are able to continue benefitting despite producing noting of value.
