Based on this article at least, he is not disagreeing with those claims, he is not even acknowledging they exist.
The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.
From an HN comment recently:
> There are three ways to make a living:
> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
He explicitly and clearly disagreed with the claims, and argued against them:
> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.
To any honest reader, it's clear he's saying the system isn't necessarily dishonest, and that it's possible (if not common) to rapidly earn money in the system by simply creating things of value and selling them to willing customers.
Except he says nothing about the system, he only talks about the founder.
I don't know what you're reading, but he's talking about the fact that her startup is growing, and has happy end users, who are purchasing her product, and telling their friends.
That is the system.
The system is a lot bigger than her product and users. Also no one in that anecdote is a billionaire so it's not even relevent to the claim.
> The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.
Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.
The original claim is stupid because it is applying a personal moral judgment to a legal system at the individual level, usually for the purposes of justifying theft or other punishments for the person being talked about. it is irrelevant whether the person is honest or dishonest by your own personal moral compass, what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under. The criticism needs to be leveled at the legal system and its ability and desire to change to accommodate the criticisms is the measure of the total system. By this correct measure what we have is amazing vs what has come before and alternate systems tried in the 20th century (looking at you *isms, which have all been terrible in the long run and usually also in the short and medium run).
The marxist nonsense about exploitation is getting really tired and needs to die already. Yes, we get it, marxists don't value anything that grows total output, don't think it should be compensated and are totally fine living in the stagnation that view creates. If they could all just skip a few steps and go to the end game of their philosophy that would be great because I'm tired of hearing from them.
> what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under.
Last election cycle, the world's richest man made the nation's largest political donation to the most expensive campaign in US history. In return he was given unprecedented (and arguably illegal) access to take a figurative chainsaw (his imagery) to our institutions.
We're all under the same laws, but we are not all operating under the same rules. To quote the President, "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
This doesn't contradict my claim at all. This is and should be a criticism of the system because the system has an ambiguity of outcome built in. If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules. I do agree with you that it would be nice to fix this so that the only difference between hiring the 50 dollar an hour and the 2000 dollar an hour lawyer is spending an additional 1950 dollars. I don't really see a way to fix this without also losing the ambiguity that makes other aspects of the system work though (i.e. the ability to do illegal things like same sex marriage/relationships enough that the overton window moves in the population enough to allow a legislative change to allow those things).
> If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules.
First, this the same logic as "the law is equal because the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges." Moreover, no, you cannot hire the same lawyers and that's the point, because what Musk got wasn't through the law, but throwing $300 million dollars at an autocrat. This isn't about $50 vs $2000.
Can you do that and buy your own government agency and a pseudo-cabinet position that circumvents senate confirmation? No? Neither can I. We're not under the same rules they are.
Your point same sex marriage doesn't make sense to me you'll have to explain it better.
You missed my first point. You get a different outcome because you can hit a different price point securing your outcome and that outcome is still constrained by law. If you make a few hundred billion like Elon did you too can do that. My point was that this mechanism is a criticism of the system, not of Elon. Elon is not doing something wrong here (at least not provably wrong yet in a court of law, see what happens as the horse he bet on loses political clout and the various institutions take a look at what was done with a different political foot on their throat).
The second point was the ambiguity in outcome is what allows societal change and I don't want to lose that because there is still a lot of stupid enshrined in our legal code and institutions. We need enforcement to be lax enough to allow people to break stupid laws and the legal code to be ambiguous enough that, when enough people's opinions have changed by the law breakers breaking the law and nothing bad happening/ the law breakers being closer friends and family of enough people that you can get a big change to the law through, either via the courts deeming the law unconstitutional or the congress critters changing the law. It's a fine line on multiple fronts there between effective changing to suite current needs and too much corruption and I don't see a way to change the system that decreases corruption without also decreasing flexibility for change so I am very cautious on that front.
If the rule is that you can get extraordinary access to state power if you are rich enough, then no, we are not meaningfully operating under the same rules. Saying “like Elon, you too can do that” is like saying anyone can influence housing policy by buying every apartment building in town. Hypothetically yes. Practically, not true and also not desirable as a system.
The problem is that wealth can buy a level of political access that ordinary citizens cannot realistically obtain at all. Once someone can spend hundreds of millions helping elect a president or pay people a million dollars to vote their way, and then get a quasi-governmental role with influence over federal agencies, then the system is no longer a system but instead a service.
Saying the system allows the ultra-rich to do this because of builtin ambiguities does not mean therefore no billionare is blameworthy for using it. If a loophole lets billionaires buy political influence, them exploiting that loophole is still part of the problem.
Your defense of him seems to reduce to: the system is corrupt, and if you were rich enough you could exploit it too. I agree that this describes how power works, but I just do not see how it defends it.