Well, first off, property taxes on homes have serious problems. People having to move because they couldn't afford their property taxes is why Prop 13 passed in California.

Second, what happens when I pay taxes on my paper wealth, then the asset decreases in value. Do I get a tax rebate the next year? Given that many assets are held for many years, this seems like a ton of unnecessary checks going to and fro.

Finally, many assets are hard to value. You don't know the true value until they are sold. The beauty of income taxes over wealth taxes is I know exactly what I sold something for so there's no need for an assessor to determine this year's fair market value.

Charity and philanthropy are all well and good. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does wonderful things and has a huge budget. But in terms of scale, charitable activities are dwarfed by for-profit activity (my guess is by two or three orders of magnitude). Far from being dead, for-profit dinosaurs are alive, kicking ass and taking names. The open source/free software world is an anomaly and only works because software development can sometimes be done for very little cost other than your time. Don't fool yourself into thinking the rest of the world works anything like that.

It must be sad on your planet. Here on Earth, telecommunications, cars, houses, home appliances, clothes, food, entertainment devices, computers, travel, and zillions of other products are better and cheaper because companies are competing for my business in a free(ish) market.

Two comments: first, tuition has grown far faster than inflation yet real estate, salaries, etc. have not. The implication is costs grew somewhere and we ought to be able to squeeze that cost back down. Second, if you're earning minimum wage, things are going to be tough no matter what. Minimum wage isn't a wage for a comfortable suburban lifestyle, it's one step above starvation. I'd love to have inexpensive paths for bright but poor kids to live up to their potential but four years in ivy-covered halls might not be realistic.

Replace "minimum" with "median" and you've got a stronger argument. But income tends to grow with age so by the time one has kids going to college, I'd hope many parents are tending to the high side of median.

And IIRC, that was the other part of the license agreement: you had to charge the same amount for in-app and out-of-app purchases. So no, you can't mark up the in-app purchase price to cover the Apple tax.

I'm grudgingly willing to allow that Apple can set whatever rules they want about what apps running in their ecosystem must and must not do. I'm much more pissed off that they're setting pricing policies for third parties, especially for purchases that don't go through any part of the Apple store.

Yeah, this is going to be a challenge to make work. I kept thinking about all the steps that have to work first time, on time, like all the explosive bolts, the radar working, the wheels deploying, descent rockets firing at just the right altitude, finding a nice smooth spot to hover over with 30 seconds (or whatever) of fuel, etc. etc.

In theory, I'm sure all of these can be solved. If they all work, I'll be impressed as hell. Forget finding life, just solving an engineering challenge like this is inspiring enough to me.

Nothing cynical about protecting their bottom line. Virtually everything Apple (or any other company does) has to consider how this affects sales and profits. That's just what companies do: they produce something I like more than I like the money in my pocket. We make a trade, everyone's happy. If they fail, I keep the money, I'm happy, they're out of business.

The beauty of competition is it forces companies to do things I like even if they're not thrilled about it.

Interesting assertion. Do you have any evidence to back up that point?

The only way that would happen is if that one person did all the work and produced all the value while everyone else lolled around eating bon-bons. That's not very realistic.

Sure it does, the lure of profits and threat of competition motivates individuals to constantly look for more efficient ways to produce more value at less cost. Socialism tends to minimize both forces (less profit for sure and indirectly less competition) so innovation is slower.

Not every company exists solely for profit. A few notable exceptions (e.g. Ben and Jerrys, HP in the pre-Carly days) explicitly put social goods in their corporate goals. I'm pretty sure the owner of a business I patronize gives huge discounts to some of the other customers because of their life circumstances. And there are no end to non-profits.

But I think you misread my comment. A business is nothing more than the people (investors, executives, managers, line workers) that compose it. Businesses don't do anything, the people that work there do things.

Personally, I enjoy giving things away but that doesn't pay my bills. I have to charge enough to pay my salary and keep the investors happy (otherwise the employees don't show up and the investors take their money elsewhere). And because my company has competition, I can't charge whatever I want. The vast majority of companies are in this boat—yes we'd charge more if we could but we just can't because our competitors are thrilled to undercut us by just enough to get the sale. I suppose I could take a pay cut and keep more people on the payroll but I'll admit it, I'm greedy and would prefer to work harder and get paid more.

Monopolies are different and that's why we have anti-trust laws. But true monopolies are quite rare. Off the top of my head, I can't think of more than a handful and all those are because my city has exclusive contracts for things like water, electricity, trash pick up and the like. Everyone else has to fight for my dollars so they can't charge what they'd like.

Now, you might not like some things some companies do, or like their prices but that's different. You've almost always got the choice of not buying or buying somewhere else. I used to not buy Microsoft products, but now see Apple as more obnoxious, so I won't buy Apple. Not that I expect very many people to agree with that, but it makes me happier.