And what exactly do you think it shows about my “life experience”?
This statement doesn’t make any sense to me. All the liberal arts trust fund babies I know don’t run jack shit. And I’m not sure why you would think otherwise. People who own small businesses and non-profits are running their small business or non-profit. And if they do it well, they end up turning it into a large business and making a fair amount of money.
Some of these posts have brought up the idea that success at the expense of others should not be encouraged.
To paraphrase Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street, the market is a zero sum game; someone goes home a winner and someone goes home a loser. Now people like to take this point and twist it to describe the “horrible evils” of Wall St. However, what most fail to realize is that this happens on Main St.
Im sure most people are familiar with the term creative destruction but for those that aren’t it basically means that with advances in technology or productivity, new firms are constantly coming out with better ways to do things and this puts old companies who cant adapt out of business.
I think that reason that less people focus on this then on Wall St is because its not as quickly materialized. Whereas if someone buys a share of Apple and it goes up the next day, he wins and the seller loses. Whats harder to see is that Main St does it the same day, albeit on a longer time horizon. When Walmart opens that new chain in the neighborhood, how many corner drugstores go out of business? Walmart simply does it better than they can. Walmart wins and they lose.
Success, at least how I see it, is almost always accompanied by failure. Therefore, the rich, who are most often portrayed as big market bullies, should not be vilified nearly as much as they are. So should they run things? My take is yes. We should reward success even when it comes at the expense of failure of others. This is how the free market works.