Moonshots and Manhattan Projects tend to be funded by the government because the United States government is one of the few entities that has tens or hundreds of billions of dollars (adjusted to 2023) to fund them.
But plenty of ventures have been funded by the private sector and it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. Some fail or end up unprofitable. Others turn into companies like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, SpaceX, and so on.
It’s not so much that billionaires “chase idiot schemes”. If Elon wants to use his billions to design his hypersonic Hyperloop train, that’s his business (such as it is). Who to say what an “idiot scheme” is? Some regulator in Washington who never worked a private sector job in his lifetime?
But I do see an issue where a single person can just come into a company as a sort of “activist investor” and just sort of wreck havoc according to their own whims or agenda without any sort of governance or oversight.
I have read it. Have you?
The point wasn’t whether Galt’s Gulch was actually feasible as a functioning society. The whole point was that people should be fairly compensated for their labor and contributions. The “bad guys” (looters and moochers) are all bureaucrats, politicians, useless middlemen, lobbyists, career academics, talentless hacks and other people who are unable or unwilling to actually make real contributions to society so they seek to create these various forms of wealth redistribution to justify and fund their existence.
Now Atlas Shrugged does have some interesting, even appealing ideas. However it isn’t a documentation of a real functioning society. And it also seems to gloss over some major philosophical issues and inconsistencies.
Well, the Manhattan Project cost the 2023 equivalent of $34 billion; it’s quite conceivable a private consortium could afford it. It actually cost more to develop the plane that dropped the bomb as it did to drop the bomb.
Actually, the primary reason the government had to develop things like Apollo, Manhattan and the B-29 is that there was no profit motive to do those things; national defense is a public good, as was going to the Moon. They were publicly funded for exactly the same reason the sewer system is; no private interest had any reason to try.
For all the talk of what SpaceX has done for space exploration, they haven’t done all that much at all for EXPLORATION, and to the extent they do, they’re working on government contracts, without which the company would not be viable. It’s not like NASA wasn’t paying aerospace companies to build rockets before.
One: prove that it can be commercially viable for a company to design, build and launch its own rockets, making space launch an ongoing service. This has culminated in the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers. Then, using the first step as a test bed-
Two: design, build and launch a rocket that doesn’t merely fulfill the current paradigm of expensive aerospace contractor/ government customer launch, but which by reusability and economy of scale drops the price of space launch so dramatically as to be a game changer. SpaceX hopes its Starship will be able to launch 100-150 short tons to orbit, at ten million dollars a launch*. If that happens entire missions that simply wouldn’t be conceivable move into the realm of possibility.
*At this writing, it looks like Starship is going to start out more expensive to launch and then hopefully get cheaper as the technology matures; we’ll see.
Notably absent from that list of looters, moochers, and redistributors are the biggest ones of all, the billionaires themselves. That’s the big lie in Ayn Rand’s works: That the billionaires are the rightful, original, and sole owners of their wealth, and didn’t get it from anyone else.
The inept James Taggart who runs Taggart Transcontinental probably qualifies. Again, I’m not sure if you’ve actually read the book or don’t get it, but there are certainly plenty of wealthy people in the world of Atlas Shrugged. They just don’t produce anything of value.
That’s really the point of the book. Ayn Rand justifies the wealth of the main characters because they are either self made men like Rearden or, when they did inherit their wealth like Dagney Taggart or Francisco d’Anconia are uber-competent incorruptible businesspeople dedicated to the ethical and fair growth of their companies. They hire the best and brightest and pay them well above market wage. The antagonists maintain their wealth through protectionism, cronyism, and other nefarious means.
The big lie of Atlas Shrugged is the world isn’t that black and white.
It’s not like billionaires don’t create anything of value and just sit on a big metaphorical pile of gold like Scrooge McDuck while everyone else just scrounges for pennies. If you look at the Forbes list of billionaires, a significant number (at least in the USA) founded their companies. So if someone like Jeff Bezos founds a company like Amazon and 30 years later it has a market cap of almost a trillion dollars, how much of that wealth does he deserve? He’s currently worth $171 billion or about 17%.
When will we realize that the corrupt government that the right is always complaining about works for the corrupt billionaires that the left is always complaining about?
it’s a losing uphill battle as long as the corrupt billionaires are spending on the media companies (and politicians) to keep people fighting against each other in distracting culture wars.
It used to be “bread and circuses” now it’s “crumbs and conflict”.
I think it’s the mindset of Sam Bankman Head thinking he can get away with defying a federal judge that blows me away. In trying to relate to this thread, even if he’s no longer a billionaire he still has an aloof mindset. Now he’s in federal custody. But also going along with the thread, in this case at least the judicial system is ready to try him and our democracy’s working in this sense.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible … Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
I don’t understand his point. The increase in people on welfare and in women voting are tough for libertarians to like, to deal with, to explain, or what? How has this changed the idea of a capitalist democracy? I don’t even know what he’s trying to say.
This short extract from the above WaPo article is informative, and also shocking:
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
True. But the context of the conversation was billionaires, not mom&pop sole proprietorships. When billionaires spend other people’s money on risky business ventures, they don’t do it via self- ownership. They incorporate, to rely on that insulating them personally from the risk.
So the corporation may fail and file for bankruptcy, but the billionaire isn’t on the hook. And then if the company is “too big to fail”, it gets government bailouts, often with the multi-millionaires who caused the failures riding their golden parachute contracts that mean they still get paid.
When CEO’s do well, they get huge bonuses. When they do poorly, they get “bought out”, i.e. paid to leave instead of being financially penalized for their poor decisions.
How many people have been murdered by governments at the behest of billionaires?
And even if the uber-rich aren’t going around shooting, stabbing, or poisoning people directly, how many deaths lay at the feet of business moguls for their decisions in how they make and save money? We have the EPA and OSHA and government regulations for a reason.
What about outsourcing labor for dangerous activities to foreign countries with laxer laws? Paying company X to dispose of used motor oil because they charge less, since instead of sending it back for re-refining, they dump it into the water supply? How many deaths and accidents are prevented not because billionaires want to keep their workforce safe, but because they will be fined if they don’t?