Hacker News
points by bryanlarsen 1 day ago | 0 comments
> I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

The modern capitalistic system has devised many fabulous ways of enabling people to buy ice cream machines and seed corn without being able to afford it individually. Equity and loans are the two most obvious, there are many more.

That is the main reason that American capitalism has thrived. Because you don't have to be rich to buy ice cream machines.

[–] roenxi 1 day ago
Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages.

The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.

[–] bryanlarsen 1 day ago
> better measure than profit

Exactly. We should be taxing profit less and wealth more.