[Deorum]

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People who are rich for technical capitalistic reasons do not truly deserve to be a lot better off than hardworking chemists in Burma.

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Why not? These people have found a way to use capitalism to their economic benefit. Wealth is a product of how well you manipulate an economic system, not of how much you have contributed to society. Or, in the case of somebody simply being given money, for instance a child being given wealth from his or her parents, that wealth is a product of how well his or her parents manipulated the economic system, and those parents ought to be allowed to do whatever they wish with that money.

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But there are planty of people who are wealthy because of the nature of the capitalist system. Options traders, baseball players, rock stars etc. Almost all of them would continue to do what they do if their salary was cut by 80% whether they liked their job or not.


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If this is true, it is because they do not want to bother developing a new set of skills for a new occupation. Athletes and rock stars learned early, when they were children, that there was a lot of money in such businesses for those who excelled in them. They then realized that they enjoyed those activities, and spent a lot of time developing the skills to succeed in those fields. How can you condemn them for finding an occupation they enjoyed, that they realized paid a lot of money if done well, and then developing the skills necessary to excel at that occupation? While many of these people might continue what they do even if their pay were significantlly reduced, and their current wealth stolen, most of them probably would have chosen a different path from the beginning if they had known at the outset that the pay was lousy.

A person is not undeserving of wealth simply because his or her occupation does not contribute as much to humanity as another occupation which does not pay as well. If your hypothetical chemist position in Burma paid what a rock star makes, and vice versa, how do you know the rock star would not have chosen early on to become a chemist instead?

It really does not matter. Wealth is a function of economics, not humanity.