this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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You're also missing the point. In your scenario, someone else did the work and the person with the money got more money as a result. This is what we mean when we say you can't earn a billion dollars - you're just skimming off other people's work
If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.
By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.
Nobody said it wasn't fair. But that's not working for money. That's explicitly the point of investing.
If you grow your own peppers, yeah you'd be working for the money. It doesn't get much clearer than that. Digging up nonsense about how 'hard' the work is in your random example is irrelevant and wildly out of touch.
Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:
Now how do you reconcile that with this:
Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?
It's not a charitable way to phrase it, but it's not inaccurate. 'Fair' is wildly subjective. The concept itself is not unfair, but the application certainly can be. Regardless of whether it's 'fair' or not, the general point is that it isn't work.
Sure. I mean you can buy a solar panel and put it on your roof and then sell the electricity it produces back to the grid. That’s not work. Is it fair? I don’t know. There are definitely people who think subsidies for solar panels are unfair.
There’s also the question of whether or not you earned the money. I think if you take a risk with your money and you invest it wisely then you’ve earned the profits you made on (minus taxes of course).
Obviously if you inherit millions of dollars from your parents you didn’t earn that. We as a society begrudgingly put up with inheritance because we admit that as humans our urge to provide for our children is a powerful instinct.
There’s also a question of whether or not an investment benefits society. I think the pepper growing and solar panel examples show clear benefits to society. With larger companies the question is a lot more complicated.
For example, I used to think Apple benefited society with all the work they put into their computers and growing the personal computer market. Now I think they’ve moved away from that towards rent-seeking. So to me it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was the behaviour.