> What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.
The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.
Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.
This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).
That's all good if you assume people can't be tricked (tricked into paying more, tricked into buying something they don't want, tricked into working harder). The tricked person ends up with less and Elon ends up with more.
Yeah sorry I was thinking about value as more about quality of life and society. If you define it as shareholder value and producing stuff, then by definition corporations and their executives are of course contributing the most.
Donald Trump is extracting mountains of wealth from the taxpayer by leveraging his position and the refusal of the GOP to do anything about his crimes.
When he gets a payout by suing the government and then directing the government to pay him, how is hie contributing to society and humanity?
Heck, a large portion of my wealth came from buying ETFs and watching the number go up. How did I contribute to society and humanity to achieve that?
The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.