"Usefulness" is such a relative thing.

Ask a workaholic who busts their ass all week for a buck, and doesn't have a family, if a guy in a mud hut is "useful"

Ask the guy in a mud hut with a giant family the same thing about the workaholic

Both will undoubtedly think the other is crazy. The guy in a mudhut obviously must be for choosing to live in a mud hut, and the workaholic because he would rather have little green pieces of paper then enjoy life.

In the end the only thing that matters is that YOUR life made YOU happy. Ranking your accomplishments based on how they are perceived by others is a waste of time

Name one whistleblower who met with a "strange accident"

His original argument has little if anything to do with "Stockholm syndrome"

The reference to "communism" refers to the ultimate meaning of this mentality of "big corporations are evil they need to suffer." It's the same thing in an extreme form

"The science is in"? Care to provide some citations?

Read Atlas Shrugged or an other Ayn Rand book. Objetivists (of which Alan Greenspan was one) can be a little wonky, but the broad strokes are right on. Atlas Shrugged does a good job of a thought experiment of "what happens if all the evil industrialists leave society"

Or pick up an economics text book. The cost of people at the top is set by supply and demand. Businesses aren't stupid if they could find someone to run a company for less then a hundred million a year they would.

Finally, you could argue that lacking a bill gates another operating system would come into being, but think about the personal computer market before windows (tandy computers had their own OS, commodore had their own os, amiga had their own OS). Unless you're implying that someone else would unify pc operating systems, in which case you're arguing that if there was no bill gates then there'd be someone similar (refuting your own argument)

The thing we're really getting at is what's called the "principal agent" problem by economists. CEOs (and other rich people) are compensated to benefit stockholders, and add value to the company. However, CEOs might do things that destroy value (things like empire building, or using company assets for personal benefit). These problems are due to misalignment of CEO interests and interests of shareholders -- not an inherent evilness of fat cats and ceos

So let's go to a communist society! The "pricks" (or producers in society) can have all of their profits taken from them. We'll give it to people who can't or won't produce, and we'll be happy because we'll have their big fat bags of money for ourselves!!

Sadly it won't work. If you remove incentive, people stop producing because they say "well if I get the same no matter how hard I work, I won't work." This actually led to famines when Mao took over red china initially. They told all the farmers they'd been "liberated", and at the end of the farm year took all the food the farmers produced that they didn't need to live. Next year the farmers produced so there was little to no excess to be taken away, and there were widespread famine. Slave labor and a semi capitalist rewards system all were tried as ways to motivate farmers to produce

It's true, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Calling it anything else is criminal insanity (what else do you call the act of taking from others what isn't yours?)

Mod parent up -- I couldnt have said it better.

People at the bottom also tend to forget how much they need people at the top. If you were to erase a billionaire like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or the guys who invented facebook from the history books, you'd also erase all of the jobs and wealth that their creativity had created for society. In addition, society would arguably lose technology or cheap resources that have been great benefit to it.

Let me put it another way, if the boards of GE or IBM or any of these companies that pay their CEOs tens of millions of dollars were looking to replace their CEO, why don't they choose cheap labor over costly labor? Like me. I'll work for only a million a year instead of tens of millions, and I'm sure there are people out there who would work for free as CEO, just to get "CEO, GE" on their resume. Well companies don't hire the cheapest workers because they'd be unqualified -- a CEO who makes 100 million a year should create value for the company of many times that. And looking at the choice of hiring a CEO who will create a billion in value and cost the company 100 million, or me, who will cost only a million but probably destroy value, the company makes the rational choice.

This is not to say that workers are not important. It's a two way street: a fat cat should not be allowed to exploit their workers (slave labor / sweat shops / etc). But to create value for a company and economy you need to pay people for the services they're doing (for lack of a better word, for their minds).

There was another poster somewhere who hit it spot on: the problem with the crisis is not all businessmen, its the ones who created a cesspool of toxic debt and banks ready to crash. Those people are criminals, and should be prosecuted as the con-artists that they are. However, punishing all business for the acts of a few con men will create a reactionary response -- and hurt the irish more then it'll help it

Well I think the big question is what happens in the event of a failure?

If a meteor falls from the sky there's probably nothing the car can reasonably do.

However if autocars are fitted with appropriate failsafe devices, they may become more safe in the event of an accident. Imagine it -- airbags that anticipate a crash and deploy beforehand, and cars smart enough to breakdown safely...