> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible.
"Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel.
It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably gonna involve a lot of other folks' work if it ever happens, who probably aren't gonna get that much of the glory.
Paul Graham is the skating coach himself, as from 6000 startups financed by y combinator quite a few were unicorns. it is olympian level, but it there is a system to it.
I'm well aware of who pg is.
I'm suggesting - and I think the politician was also clearly suggesting - that a certain point of scale it ceases to really be "earning" anymore.
It's not a reliable system if out of 6000 tries over 20 years there are only 30 instances. That looks more like gambling.
You’re suggesting that selling others’ talent isn’t legitimate “earning”? Why?
I'm saying there's a difference between earning and benefiting from.
Selling others labor isn't legitimate earning when you get a higher share of the labors value than the laborer themselves.
You can earn by deploying your own labor to facilitate transactions between other laborers, such as by running a job fair, that's completely legitimate, good, and creates value. You can't just take 90% of someone's wages, or rather, you can, and many people do, but it's theft.
Because it's not your labor to sell and if you take part of the proceeds for yourself, that's theft.
Because they believe in the Marxist labor theory of value, where apparently it's theft if someone else uses your labor to make something more than you could make yourself, not understanding the fact that that's not how labor markets and total human collaboration works to make something more than the sum of individuals.