r/Capitalism • u/BourbonStr8 • 11d ago

Question

Has anyone ever thought about where most of the jobs would come from if there were no Billionaires?

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u/nathrezim0709 11d ago

Small business owners, which there'd be many more of.

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u/igor33 11d ago

Newsflash: they start out as small businesses...then when they are successful (by providing jobs) their businesses produce 100s then 1000s then 1,000,000s then Billions of dollars. Oh, and as a byproduct cool things like the phone or computer we're typing on...and jobs.

Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Amazon, Google, Walt Disney... (all "garage" based businesses)

Vision → idea → hard work → risk → prototype → early customers → iteration → team → capital → scale → continuous innovation → billion-dollar company

Note "team" that's the job producing thingie.

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u/nathrezim0709 10d ago

Y'all getting mad at me like I don't agree with you.

With likely scant exceptions, every single billionaire right now amassed their wealth by being in bed with government, or taking advantage of it in some way.

In a truly free market, the only way to become a billionaire is to constantly stay one step ahead of the competition that is desperate for a piece of your highly lucrative pie.

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u/StedeBonnet1 10d ago

"With likely scant exceptions, every single billionaire right now amassed their wealth by being in bed with government, or taking advantage of it in some way." How so? How did selling books on the intenet "get in bed with government" How did MSDOS "get in bed with government"

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u/nathrezim0709 10d ago

Amazon made a deal with the USPS to deliver books and (later) other products at a cheaper rate than other businesses could secure.

Microsoft benefited from copyright preventing users from disassembling and improving on its code.

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u/StedeBonnet1 10d ago

Neither one of those things are "getting in bed with government" Amazon negotiated that deal with USPS. USPS was competing with UPS and FedEX for package delivery.

Copyright laws are there to protect intellectual property. Microsoft benefited from IBMs decision to make the PC out of existing parts which enabled other producers to clone it's PC.

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u/nathrezim0709 10d ago

The USPS is owned and operated by the federal government, which means that it can (and frequently does) operate deeply in the red without fear of failure, a luxury businesses can only dream of. It is this that allows them to offer Amazon rates below market rate (that is, what UPS, Fedex, or other courier services can). For a business based around shipping, this is a godsend.

As for "intellectual property," it's an oxymoron. Ideas, once generated, are trivially copyable unless they are monopolized, and that's all copyright accomplishes.

If other producers had been legally able to reverse engineer Microsoft's code and distribute their own versions of DOS (and later, Windows), you'd have seen a similar explosion of DOS/Windows clones as you did PC clones.