Bare with me this takes a bit of logic
The purpose of the economy is to produce things for humans to consume.
The economy has 2 inputs, Capital and Labour, and two outputs more capital and consumption.
We produce more than we ever have in history.
*Billionaires and Trillionaires do not consume much more food than the rest of us. They consume more luxury items than regular people but not 1000x more. Most of the earnings of the very rich go to producing more capital.

*The over 55 make up 27% of the Canadian population. If they are working, they have the highest incomes of any workers. They have pensions and investment income. They enjoy living in the most desirable parts of our cities. They enjoy 60% of the healthcare. The over priced housing represents trillions in consumption transfer from younger workers to them. My guess is that the oldest 27% of Canadians are being subsidized, if you include the over priced housing, by 30% of Canadian GDP. This is on top of their earnings and pensions.

The first liars are the over 55, crying poor and voting for more benefits to themselves. Voting to further restrict new housing to push up the value of their homes.
The second liars are the wanna be boomers, those that are hoping the pyramid scheme of our economy will keep going just one more generation. They own homes with huge mortgages. They are counting the days till they retire.

The moron - this is the person blaming the billionaires for their plight. For their lack of opportunity. You have to feel sorry for the moron. They are desperate for an easy solution and the two liars are happy to let the moron blame the billionaire for their plight.

Every contract you enter into requires both parties to uniquely identify each other. Without a unique government ID number the parties will have to know names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, email address and probably your mother's maiden name. Giving all that is far more of an invasion of privacy than giving someone a 9 digit number. Yes, maybe fewer of those identifiers will work for a given person but for some people you will need the entire set of personal information.

In Canada we have pretty much stopped policing shoplifting and causing a disturbance in private places. My youngest daughter doesn't feel safe on some bus routes or is some shopping areas. If society as a whole won't do this type of policing and keeping drunks, shoplifters or those who are high out of shopping malls and stores the store owners or mafia will have to. This isn't about a police state, this is about others filling the void the state has abandoned. The government is the one who provides services. The number one service of a society is the enforcement of commercial contracts. I know that last sentence will upset people but all societies are built on people coming together to shop and to trade services. Protecting that is more important than preventing murder, fire protection and all the social services. If the government abandons that people will very quickly find another group to do it.

Rona (think the Canadian equivalent of Lowe's and Homedepot) has been doing this for 20+ years. They hire either students or retired people. They hire way more than they need and let everyone choose the shifts they want. Kids get mentored and retired people have something to do. Plus you actually get staff at the stores that can explain things.

Rona was purchased by Lowe's a few years ago, rebranded Lowe's and is now being rerebranded Rona.

Remember the kid who was arrested for making a private bomb joke? It was obviously a joke and it got escalated to the point of fighter jets being scrambled. https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

We see this time and time again where people in authority face no consequences of escalating a threat when common sense would at least warrant a bit more investigation. The police officers in the case above should be reprimanded and a note be made about their lack of judgement. Either that or they need to show the person sending them out for this arrest had claimed the information they were given was correct with a high degree of confidence. Blindly passing on incorrect or information that has a reasonable chance to be incorrect without also forwarding the confidence level of that information is incompetent and needs to have a consequence.

Samsung is making great profits right now but the higher prices are encouraging competition and customers to look for substitutes or to make do with less. Samsung sees the current high price as damaging to future profits, hence the reason they are paying massive bonuses to keep their factories going 24/7.

If I have already built my infrastructure, have paying customers and a profitable business model and the government wants me to change how I do business they have to pay me enough to make it worth my while. Setting up rules after I have invested is not just morally wrong but extremely damaging to business confidence in a country. Companies, if they are being regulated into doing something will try and avoid it, they might even just drop the critical infrastructure all together. Plus the government will f#$k it up. And even if they don't f#$k it up writing the rules they will fail to enforce the rules so the companies that try to be compliant will end up being less competitive.

So if the government wants companies to build more robust "stuff", the government (society as a whole) had better pay.

SPCX carries 196 million shares sold short, representing 31% of the float. Anyone other than Musk or large pre IPO investors can sell at any time. Musk and the pre IPO investors can start selling a different times in August, September and October. 2 days after the Q2 earnings report (180 days after the IPO) there will be no restrictions for anyone.

So basically you have no idea what you were talking about

If you know SpaceX isn't worth 2T you can always short their shares.

Most rich people pay a stupid amount for cellular and home internet. There are probably 500M people who will pay over $100/month, another 500M who pay at least $50 and another 5B who pay $15 or more. So 150B/month = 1.8T per year. Assuming Starlink only gains 20% of the world market and their capital is obsolete in 5 years. They need to spend less than 1.8T every 5 years to be profitable. Space is expensive but not that expensive. I've seen some estimates as low as 10B. That's a rounding error compared to the revenue. Maybe you hate Musk and Bezo but you have to admit, in a reasonably fair market they are providing a valuable service to people.

Is to raise money to create new capital. High stock prices enable companies to buy machinery, invest in R&D. Stock options are used to attract better talent without having to spend money early on. Dividends on the stock are the motivation for people to buy stocks. Speculative profits are really a distant fourth function of the stock market.

I always hated having to buy 4 different standards each referencing the next about some requirement for my key pad that I must have, only to find buried in the 4 document that my correction button had to be yellow. I generally avoided any standard that required payment to implement, even if the standard claimed to be open (looking at you Connected Standards Alliance).

The more general problem for society is allowing existing groups to govern who can join or practice in their field. Hair stylists should not be able to restrict who is able to cut hair. Doctors should not be policing themselves. A Law society, run by lawyers, definitely shouldn't be the ones you have to complain to about a problem lawyer. Here is a good libertarian take on it: https://reason.com/2022/03/21/...

Public and private debt in China is 300% of GDP. The USA this is 122% with government debt being 105% of GDP. The US debt has accumulated over decades while, due to the massive in crease in Chinese GDP in the last 5 decades most of the debt is recent. The Chinese economy still makes the wrong things. The biggest example is how many dwellings they build that can't be sold profitably. The workforce is f#@ked with Chinese women able to retire at 50. Their birth rate dropped below replacement in 1990. Currently 3 people retire for every 2 that enter the workforce and it will get much worse in 10 years.

China is what happens when you aggressively mess with supply and demand. They are a warning to all socialists especially those socialists pretend conservatives (Farm subsides, rent control, military spending, restrictions on medical supplies, guilds I mean licensing bodies, ...)

Tesla did not take 9 years to sell a car profitably. Tesla was founded in 2003 and could sell a roadster at a profit in 2009. Tesla's first profitable quarter was first quarter 2013. The difference is Tesla was sinking all their money into expanding and designing new products. Now if Chinese auto makers are still selling the physical cars at a loss then that is a big problem for them. For us, the consumers, it's like someone giving you free money.

How would you have funded and created SpaceX? It was funded by Musk, he took the lion share of the risk. There were other investors but they invested because Musk had already invested. Most of the initial funding was his, if the company partially fails, he loses his investment first. When he was worth 100B what would you have done? How would you have divided up that wealth such that there would still have been an incentive and money to create SpaceX? Or would you have taken the wealth when he was worth only 1B? What would you have done with the wealth that is Tesla?

If you are a reasonable liberal or social democrat how would you have created these new things? And if you don't create them please tell me how society as a whole would be better off?

I care that capital is well used. I don't care if it is a government, an AI, a committee or a single person who makes the decisions on how to allocate capital. Musk has demonstrated that he is better than anyone else in the world at using capital. If he becomes a 10 Trillionaire then that would be good for society as a whole. Musk doesn't eat more calories than me, he doesn't have 1000x as many homes as me. His personal consumption is comparable to the average person. His wealth benefits society at large a million times more than it does him. Him being worth 100x more than what he is worth today would be a gain to society.

Imagine if we blocked him being worth more than 100 million, we wouldn't have ecommerce between strangers - Paypal reduced the stranger fraud problem to a level low enough for paypal to insure transactions. If we set the limit to 1B then Tesla would have gone bankrupt and SpaceX wouldn't exist. Starlink wouldn't exist. The boring company wouldn't exist. And what would we have traded this for? What would society have gotten in return? Some people would feel better?