If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.
At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people’s lives X much better, and they do the same for you.
We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person’s lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.
Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That’s the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn’t improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There’s nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.
How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?
It doesn’t matter. One person can’t put forth 48k lifetimes worth of effort, and they don’t deserve that much in return.
I promise the dude hasn’t worked harder than the combined efforts of 48 thousand people.
We can reward talent, and we can reward effort. But no combination of those two is as ridiculous as our reward structure. Our reward structure is flawed because people with money make the rules, and their primary rule is that people with money should have more money.
What you are saying is true, but there is not a better option for how the economy works that doesnt end really bad. I dont like bill gates, but the idea that he cant have what he has doesnt end well.
To answer this question seriously, Bill Gates has held back computing by stealing other people’s work and ideas and using Embrace Extend and Extinguish.
If Bill Gates had no existed, arguably open source computing and hardware would be even more advanced than what we have now. Windows has been a net detriment to society.
