On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 17:26, David Schwartz wrote:
> Believe it or not, the easiest way to get rich is to provide people
> what they want at a reasonable price. The purpose of money is to
> provide an incentive for other people to do what you most need done.
I agree. Thus, if there is a significant difference in our points of
view it must be one of semantics as to what "get rich" means.
/* opps, this got rather long winded */
My main objection is that those who seek to "get rich" then seek to get
even richer by using their wealth to distort the playing field in their
favor by various means. Or those who would claim innocence while
exploiting non-ethical methods pioneered by others. The latter would be
those who take the position that it is OK to leverage the concept of
"intellectual property" because it is what all the wealthy folks are
doing.
When I was born (1961) something like 50% of the wealth in the US
belonged to 40% of the people. Today, over 90% of the wealth belongs to
less the 5% of the people. (The statistics in the last two sentences are
vague memory, I do not stand behind their absolute accuracy.) When my
father bought his home in 1970 for $21,000 he was making about $10 an
hour as a highly skilled carpenter. Such a highly skilled carpenter in
the same region makes not quite twice that today. However, the same
home now sells for about $145,000 or more than seven times as much. For
the majority of Americans these trends hold true i.e. stagnant wages
while the cost of everything goes through the ceiling. The exceptions
to this are those who work in fields that control the flow of
information in some way. These methods include such means as lobbying
successful for laws that promote or protect certain business models,
limiting who might enter a field by raising the bar to entry, asserting
"intellectual property" rights, and questionable business practices that
lead to a market monopoly.
I wonder how it looked to the rest of a society when a power elite
emerged in the past? Would there not have been many parallels to what
we are seeing today? Would they have not heard many of the same
arguments being used today? Would not many of the influential
dissenters have been bought off by giving them a vested interest in the
emerging/existent power structure?
As was commented elsewhere in this ridiculous thread, it is funny how
one's tune changes once they too own a piece of intellectual property.
-- Chief Gadgeteer Elegant Innovations- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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