Sam

[Lucy Biggers @LLBiggers]

Despite what @GretaThunberg pushes, the planet is not burning.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Socialists imagine a class struggle. In their made-up fantasy the CEO is in competition with low level workers, the wealthy entrepreneur is stealing from the underpaid nurse.

In reality, workers do not compete vertically they compete horizontally.

Entrepreneurs compete with entrepreneurs. Investors outbid each other. CEOs are benchmarked against other CEOs. Nurses are hired from a pool of nurses. Etc.

The CEOs pay has no correlation to the entry level workers. The Football star on £300K a week isn’t linked to the person selling drinks in the stadium. A biotech entrepreneur raising VC capital isn’t paid relative to a cleaner.

What is linked is the demand and supply dynamic of each role.

If a company places an ad for a qualified truck driver and 150 people apply for the role, then the company knows it does not need to increase wages for that role. If the company has an open role for months, it is forced to look at the compensation package.

Same for a CEO. A board representing shareholders would like to hire a CEO for a lot less if they could. Their dream scenario would be to hire a CEO who brings in institutional investors, attracts top executives, drives innovation and growth, keeps margins steady and is a good public face for the business even under pressure. It turns out there aren’t a lot of these people looking for work and if you want one you have to pay more than other companies are offering.

The class struggle isn’t vertical it’s horizontal. CEOs are in competition with CEOs. Retail workers are in competition with retail workers. Demand and supply dynamics set the price.

Sure you can say that a CEO want’s profitability and would like wages to be lower BUT it’s not up to the CEO - demand and supply tension sets the price of workers. An Airline like RyanAir would like free pilots if they could get them but they can’t… so they pay the market rate.

The reason incomes are rising at the top and falling at the bottom is not class warfare. It’s technology and globalisation.

Technology makes basic jobs simple, remote or fully automated. At the same time tech makes executive roles more leveraged, more important and more valuable.

A CEO used to run a smaller organisation. Today a CEO who’s 2% better on a $5B company is generating $100M more. Seems sensible to try and pay a few million to get $100M.

Globalisation has put workers from all over the world in completion with each other - downward pressure on wages. Globalisation has given CEOs more market opportunities to explore - upside opportunity to unlock.

The rich are not very interested in buying houses that poor people own. The poor are not buying up the homes the rich want. They are separate groups living separate lives. Try finding the genuinely rich people whose strategy is to hoard normal residential homes - it barely exists as a thing. About 85% of landlords are people who own 1-4 properties. Super-landlords (100+ properties) are 0.2% of landlords and own a tiny fraction of the 30M homes in the UK… and they’re heavily taxed.

Class warfare isn’t real. It’s an imagined war in the minds of socialists.

Demand and supply dynamics are real. To the degree it is measured in class, it’s a horizontal competition not a vertical one.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

This Mamdani-style anti-American chic that gets gushing reviews from self-hating upper class neurotics is just a revived late-sixties/early 70s fad that was boring and stupid then, and still is now

[Sam @SamMatern]

Bye bye Germany

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

This is why no one in any Western country can cut any welfare spending ever and why we keep going further and further into debt.

Because any time anyone reduces spending on anything, an example can be wheeled out of a person who suffered or even died as a result.

On this basis, there can never be too much spending, too much aid or too much tax.

Indeed, the author of the tweet I am quoting will almost certainly oppose paying taxes of 100% or having 100% of his country's GDP be used in aid to the developing world. Despite the fact that his failure to give all his/his country's money away is demonstrably killing people right now. How many lives could be saved by having all of his money go to Africa? How many millions could be saved by having all of the federal budget be sent to the poorest parts of the world?

[david friedberg @friedberg]

I would like to see you make a voluntary contribution of 5% of your family’s $200M net worth to the government for important healthcare, childcare, and jobs. Don’t worry, it’s just one-time. Your $10M contribution will provide free childcare for over 1,000 California kids for a year! Once you’ve made your personal contribution to a more just and equitable society, I’ll support all your other asset seizure ideas. But you gotta go first…

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.

Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.

Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.

As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”

Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.

Time to choose your side.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

government destroys value.

in this case, the value of an American education was destroyed in ~40 years.

if there’s no marketplace for customers (parents of students) to demand value (quality of education for price paid) by simply going to another service provider (school or educator), it is inevitable that costs will go up and quality will go down.

this is true of any service provided by government, which effectively grants itself a monopoly, deleting the opportunity for other service providers to compete in offering better value to customers/citizens…

[Sam @SamMatern]

@DeepValueBagger And you mean rotate the entirety of it right? When do you think this baby account will end up at 7 figures? Should I just expect the long game?

[Matt Popovich @mpopv]

you’d have to be steeped pretty far in confirmation bias to believe this is some intrinsic property of putting computers in buildings rather than evidence that some construction company sucks

[Naval @naval]

The latest IQ test involves data centers and water.

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

@smi30966 Young women have grown up on the message that men hate them, can't be trusted, and want to do them harm; that men hold all the power and run the world; that they can't let their guard down for one second or they'll be destroyed. No surprise they eventually started believing it

[Pew Research Center @pewresearch]

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: https://t.co/qBtj1ycDkP

[Sam @SamMatern]

They called Magellan deranged.

[Mason @webdevMason]

Nobody knows what comes next for Venezuela, but it speaks volumes that noone knows that better than the Venezuelans and they're absolutely ecstatic

[Sam @SamMatern]

When two desires align, action follows.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

why not just raise income tax rates?

because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”.

you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens.

you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.)

the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen.

the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure.

it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking.

that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all.

i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%.

want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes.

want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…

[Sam @SamMatern]

Strive to be a peacemaker.

[Sam @SamMatern]

Context is lost when you skip the source for your preferred speaker's take.

This is a major reason for the growing divide of opinions.