I prefer my bits non optimized than someone else deciding how they should be "optimized" for me. Thank you!

And that is just one of the many many motives because education should not be managed by the government. It can be paid by the government, but putting the government to manage it opens the doors for all kinds of abuse in addition to government's natural inefficiency. Either you have overprotect employees that can do or not do anything and are all but unfireable or you have employees fired because of political and bureaucratic motives regardless of their competence.

But the list measures only hits and therefore it is has some information about notability, much more than it has about influence at least. The fact of this guy appearing as a notable person is even weirder than it would be if it appeared in a list that really tries to infer influence.

And that is in great part the result of the misguided ideas mainstream humanities and the ideas of the Frankfurt School propagates. Every nation that has followed these ideas is on the bottom of the pit.

We are much better off without humanities PHDs, rest assured.

Oh and that is stupid. Sure you do. People that have high monthly income do pay a higher tax in Norway or Sweden. But neither in Norway nor in any other developed country we have taxes over property and assets. The end result is that really rich people pay far less taxes than poor people there. Because rich people have no income. They never realize profits.

It is the middle class that sustains the welfare state, not the rich. As it is always the case. In Norway it will go for a long time yet because they have oil money to keep going. In Sweden on the other hand taxes over higher income are being constantly lowered as the state struggles to keep its finances stable.

You shouldn't care at all if they exist. You should care if the system that allows them to exist is the best system in existence to make you prosper though, which happens to be the case.

Even the permatemp employees are better off working for him in the conditions that they did than they would be otherwise and that is exactly why they worked for him. We still live in a free society. Nobody is forced to work for anybody else.

And no I am not suggesting anything. I am blatantly stating that MS success didn't come at the cost of US society. Much on the contrary it came to the benefit of US society and the astounding feats of success like this be maybe achieved by other people, but not many people, and those people would end equally rich. Having an idea and making it work is not as trivial as you think, otherwise you would be a billionaire at this point. ;)

No, my friend, I would tell him to accept the help anyone willingly decide to give him and would give my help. You, on the other hand, would be one of those that would turn your back on him, let him drown, and write a rant saying that we should force other people with bigger boats to help people drowning.

Oh, you expected to have a linear correlation between the positions in the graphiic and per capita GDP? Please that is silly.

The important fact is that you can't find countries that have populations with a good income and quality of life and are not near the top of that list. That is the undeniable truth.

That is ridiculous and it becomes abundantly clear when you realize the truth of my last statement. The wealth you are "denying" the masses would even exist in the first place.

No we wouldn't, in exact the same way other countries do not. Things do not come from thin air. People need to create them. US economical strength comes from all the people that start small companies in the hope of getting rich or at least vastly improve their wealth, and many of them are successful.

And he is wrong in this point, as you are. They are as much middle men as day traders. And day traders exist for a long time and have a positive effect on trading and do provide liquidity. HFT does exactly the same thing day traders do just in a faster time scale.

Oh 27th is very good in a list of 178 countries. Therefore you proved yourself my point.

And one of the natural results of economic freedom is stratification of wealth. They are not orthogonal issues. The only way to prevent people from getting rich is by forcing them not to be, that is hardly freedom.

Oh and answering your previous comment, All those billionaires were actually instrumental in improving US economy and generating wealth. Microsoft alone that wouldn't exist if not for Gates generated hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth, and a good part of it was paid in salaries and shares to its employees which bought goods and service from many many other people.

Oh it is easy to show you. Check any system where the government prevents people from getting rich, like for example USSR, China before the last decades when they opened to the free market, North Korea, Cuba, etc, and see the amount of wealth generated by these countries even with the incredible amount of resources some of them have.

Now compare that to the wealth generated by the countries at the top of the World Heritage Foundation list of economic freedom.

And a very large portion of this wealth wouldn't exist if the system didn't allow for rich people to exist in the first place, and so your whole theory of zero sum game goes down the drain.

Oh, but people do it all the time. There are several community managed broadband ISPs in Germany, for example. As an activity becomes more and more lucrative, which is what happens when a monopoly forms, there is plenty of incentive for competing and overcoming such barriers. Especially considering a large part of these barriers consist in costs directly and indirectly caused by government regulation.

All the monopolies that exist are in heavy regulated areas. Actually there are not heavy regulated areas where there is anything more competitive than oligopolies. See telecommunications for reference.

Now in areas where the regulation is minimum, lax, largely ignored or even non existent as in some countries, like for example cloth selling there are no monopolies and not even oligopolies and none can form.

As regulation increases in any area smaller business start to close and oligopolies and eventually monopolies start to form. The process is always the same.

Oh and nobody said anything about no governments. Governments have 3 very good motives to exist and should focus on those 3 things only:

- Provide physical security to people by preventing violence from being committed by people (police and criminal justice);
- Serve as arbitrator in disputes (civil justice)
- protect the country from external threats (military)