this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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This guys a fucking dolt. Has a crazy linkedin as well. Totally a "self made" person too. Didnt need any external help whatsoever. Elon deserves all his wealth.

So many holes in this argument it could be swiss cheese.

I'm noticing a trend lately among these types trying to equate it to "Pokémon cards". I wonder if its actually just bots? Or maybe copycats. Either way, its an idiodtic viewpoint.

From xitter @brivael

Elon once said something about resource allocation that really stuck with me. In essence: once you pass a certain level of wealth, money ceases to be about consumption; it becomes about capital allocation.

That single sentence changes everything.

At its core, economics is simply a problem of allocation. You have finite resources and infinite potential uses for them. Who decides what goes where?

Imagine a school playground. One hundred children, packs of Pokémon cards distributed at random. You let them be. Very quickly, an order emerges. The skilled players accumulate the rare cards; the collectors sort and organize; the negotiators strike deals. No one planned any of this. And yet, every single card ends up in the hands of the person who derives the most value from it. The system maximizes the total happiness of the playground. That is the "invisible hand."

Now, introduce the teacher. She finds this unfair. Leo has 50 cards; Tom has 3. She confiscates them, redistributes them, and enforces equality. Three immediate consequences follow: The skilled players stop playing—what’s the point? The unskilled players lose any incentive to improve—they’ll get their share regardless. Trade grinds to a halt. The playground is now equal—and dead. She maximized equality, but she destroyed happiness.

The teacher’s problem is that she cannot possibly possess the information that the playground—as a collective—held. This is Mises’s "economic calculation problem," first formulated in 1920. The USSR spent 70 years trying to solve it through Gosplan. The result: shortages, queues, and total collapse. Not because the Soviets were unintelligent, but because the problem is mathematically insoluble under a centralized system.

When Musk possesses 200 billion dollars, he doesn’t consume it; he allocates it. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI—every single dollar represents a bet on the future. And he has a track record to back it up: PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. He has demonstrated that he knows how to identify immense problems and allocate resources to them with spectacular efficiency.

The State, too, has a track record: crumbling hospitals, a declining education system, exploding debt, and public services deteriorating despite constantly rising budgets. The market identifies effective resource allocators; politics identifies effective communicators.

Profit is not an end in itself; it is a signal. It says: you have allocated scarce resources toward a use that people value enough to pay for. The larger the profit, the greater the value created. When Starlink becomes profitable, it means that millions of people in rural areas finally have access to the internet. When a government ministry runs a deficit, it means it is consuming more than it produces. One creates; the other destroys—and we call that redistribution.

In our societies, there are two categories of actors: entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. The entrepreneur takes a personal risk to identify a problem, mobilize resources, and create a solution. If he is wrong, he loses. If he is right, his customers win, his employees win, his suppliers win, and the State collects taxes. He is the fundamental unit of human progress.

The bureaucrat takes no personal risk whatsoever. His salary is guaranteed. At best, he maintains an existing economic rent. At worst, he destroys it through excessive regulation, forced misallocation of resources, and perverse incentives that discourage those who produce. But under no circumstances does he create.

Look at the last 50 years: the iPhone, the civilian internet, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA technology, ChatGPT. All are private inventions, championed by entrepreneurs and funded by venture capital. Not a single government ministry has invented anything that has fundamentally changed your daily life.

France has become the global laboratory for bureaucratic drift—with public spending accounting for 57% of GDP, an absolute record. A sprawling bureaucracy; a tax system that penalizes wealth creation. The result: falling behind the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. Brain drain. Deindustrialization. Exploding debt.

And the worst part is that this misallocation is self-reinforcing. The more the State levies, the less entrepreneurs create. The less they create, the smaller the tax base becomes. The more the State goes into debt and taxes. A perfect negative feedback loop. The mistress believes she is helping, yet every year, the court produces less.

In our societies, it is—invariably—the entrepreneurs who drive civilization forward. Bureaucrats, at best, merely preserve existing rents; at worst, they destroy them. No society has ever progressed by taxing its creators to subsidize its administrators.

The question is never "who has how much?" Rather, it is: "Who is best equipped to allocate the next unit of resources to maximize the future of humanity?" For the past 200 years, the answer has remained unchanged. It is not the civil servants. 2:34 AM · Apr 29, 2026 · 65.2M Views

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[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Look at the last 50 years: the iPhone, the civilian internet, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA technology, ChatGPT. All are private inventions, championed by entrepreneurs and funded by venture capital. Not a single government ministry has invented anything that has fundamentally changed your daily life.

Notice the qualifier: the civilian Internet. The civilian Internet developed out of the military Internet which was invented by a "government ministry", namely DARPA. What does this clown think were the important Internet technologies invented by corporations? HTML, email, the first web browsers...none of these were invented by for-profit corporations.

Oh, and mRNA technology? Also developed by DARPA.

SpaceX is easy; they're building on NASA research.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

They're just trying to "prove" that innovation is impossible without crony capitalism so they can keep making useless ai video generators to slopify the internet and enrich billionaires before the crash.

They've never heard of FOSS or insulin, apparently.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not to mention that all of those tech products rely on technology and software that was developed at universities or government labs.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah these people are just completely full of shit. Anyone who's ever worked at a private business knows that private companies can be just as if not more inefficient than government organizations. If they say the opposite they're just plain lying to you.

[–] CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

This guy out here just discovered what "opportunity cost" is and thinks it was worth sharing a blog post about it. He doesn't understand how capitalism and the perversion of the market caused by extreme wealth concentration will cause things to valued differently than if we used a different system or had more equal distribution. He also doesn't seem to realize how much innovation is state-funded.

There is an entire book about how Mises economic information problem has already been solved, and the proof is Walmart and Amazon. It's called "The People's Republic or Walmart" and it's good. Considering his argument opened with that, that's where he should start.

[–] twopi@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

He gets shot and composted. The matter in his body goes to the plant planted on top of the composted corpse. I eat said plant. That is resource allocation along the lines of survival of the fittest. In a different world, before he gets shot someone stops him. Both he and and I are alive. This is the forced equality of being alive. This is tyranny and oppression.

The problem is I can opt out of Pokémon. I never played Pokémon in school but I cannot opt out of eating.

The CO2 that is the result of my body burning sugar goes to a plant. The plant uses the sun to turn the CO2 to sugar. I eat the plant to burn the sugar to do what I want. I am harvesting the sun's energy through a cycle.

What the "entrepreneur" does is to enclose land and chooses which plants to grow. But the plant still needs the CO2 from my body to grow. So I still breathe and help grow his food. However, he prevents me from getting the sugar (and nutrients) from the plants that I help make and tells me I have to pay for the food. How do I pay for the food? By working for the "entrepreneur". I then spend some of my energy, gained by burning sugar from the plant to do what the "entrepreneur" wants for money with which I buy plants to burn more sugar to do more of what he wants. This was way the "entrepreneur" is not creating wealth, he is harnessing a sugar burning furnace for his own gain. This is the same way a hydro-dam does not create a river but harnesses it. A more efficient hydro-dam makes more electricity, but a hydro-dam by itself does not create wealth, it harnesses it.

[–] santibb@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

These people continue to destroy the fabric of society in the name of progress while living in ivory towers. Who is best equipped? Elected officials that have been elected fairly and representatively. Not unelected, out of touch billionaires without morals or empathy.

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, a lot of those elected officials are being bought off by the unelected, out-of-touch billionaires without morals or empathy.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, but that doesn't mean we need to defend billionaires.

  1. Make money illegal in politics, punishable by life in prison or living at the average salary of your country's inhabitants for life.

  2. Make billionaires illegal.

[–] Chakravanti@monero.town 1 points 1 week ago

Make money illegal.

FTFY

Joker was the Good Guy.

"Who is best equipped to allocate the next unit of resources to maximize the future of humanity?” For the past 200 years, the answer has remained unchanged. It is not the civil servants.

Except every single government bailout ever where a businessman went hat-in-hand to a civil servant begging for help.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's like people make a fortune by disregarding the social contract in order to extract wealth, and they think that somehow makes them a brilliant mastermind so surely everyone must want to know their secrets....

Like, no dude, we know. We're just not complete psychopaths.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

I always go back to the monkey analogy. If 1 monkey hoarded all the bananas and let every other monkey starve, we would be studying it for mental deformities. If a human does it, they get on the cover of Forbes.

Also realistically, the other monkeys would tear the psychopath monkey apart, as humans should take note.

[–] RiderExMachina@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Wow, what a complete tool.

[–] GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here, watch me disprove the Pokémon Card theorem.

Kids on the playground begin to treat Pokémon cards as currency, swapping them for toys the other kids own or tasks other kids might need. One girl starts selling bracelets, using Pokémon cards as currency. She has a lot of Pokémon cards, because she earned them. One boy sees this as unfair. His father is extremely rich, so he begs his dad to buy him more Pokémon cards, so he can 'compete' with the girl who earned hers. He buys him so many Pokémon cards that all he can do is flaunt his wealth.

Pokémon cards lose all meaning on the playground because the rich boy has so many that no one can have more. He stops spending Pokémon cards on things like homework swaps or bracelets or cool drawings or cootie-catcher fortune telling, because he already bought all the things he wants. The playground economy collapses because the rich boy won capitalism with daddy's money.