Comment So government to steal less from Musk than frok me (Score 1) 356
Government exists by confiscating money earned by others. This is supposed to be "for the public good," or so we are led to believe. And government taxes to exert public policy objectives. For example, it taxes tobacco and liquor because "they're bad" and gives tax "breaks" in the form of deductions for home owner interest because "owning a house is good." Pick your own examples. Insofar as taxes work, such as when government uses taxes to build roads, it's not an unreasonable system. But that part of government is relatively rare. Most of the time government confiscates our money to give to someone else government has decided is more deserving or needs it more. And the one thing government itself needs more is money for itself because government always has another "program" that needs funding, including its own bureaucracy.
Basically government is a huge confiscation scheme designed to bleed as much wealth from its citizens as it can without killing them and thus stopping the flow of wealth from private hands where it is created into public hands which, more often than not, wastes it on dubious programs.
The interesting part is the way the public perceives all this and gets upset when it is discovered that government is stealing less money from one part than another. Rather than say, "That's a good start" we say, "That's not fair!" meaning we think the government should be confiscating more from companies such as Musk's, which are doing well, and (just a minor point) promoting those policies and technologies the government wants promoted.
So where is the collective outrage over the billions spent by this administration on "shovel ready" jobs that provided a few dozen? Where is the outrage when the government subsidized a "solar business" to much hoopla and coverage only to see them go bankrupt a few months later because, of all things, cost of production exceeded revenue? (Government is such an astute student of proper business practices, after all.)
But when Musk shows how to run a business properly the media gets all upset and says the public is shouldering all the costs. Not really. It's just a matter of disparate confiscation assuming government ought to steal the same amount (or percentage, or whatever) from everyone.
I, for one, am quite happy to "bear this burden" for something that hopes to increase my own independence and wealth in contrast to government taking a trillion dollars a year from us only to redistribute down a rat hole that doesn't work anyway.