The Wealthy Ogre of Capitalism

Isn't it nice to have a punching bag we can all beat up a little bit when we're in a bad mood? When you realize your potential for earning money has a cap on it, it's kind of nice to blame other people for the fact that you're not a millionaire.

I vote for Walmart. What a terrible company. They have so much money and influence, they can afford to be our punching bag. In fact, if companies like Walmart didn't exist, we would all have a better chance at earning money, so in a way it's Walmart's fault that we're poor.

...I hereby decree that anyone who agrees with the sentiments expressed in the above paragraphs is wrong. Very, very wrong, and incredibly ignorant of reality.

It's interesting, though, the way that everyone seems to believe that if you have money, you are automatically a bad person, even an immoral person. I see nothing wrong with money. I hope to be extremely rich, and I'm pointedly ignoring the phrase "filthy rich" because I don't think there's anything filthy about it. I think that my being rich will be a sign of the highest ideals I can hold, those of production, work, ingenuity, and integrity. Being rich is moral, not immoral.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"

I might add that Paul did not say that money was the root of all evil. What Paul wanted Timothy to understand was that loving money is the root of evil. I do not love money, I love the activity that brings me money: engineering, invention, work, providing a service or product for people who need it. When immorality and the root of all evil creep in is at the moment that one's love for money overrules his ability to live morally, to create by his mind and let others create by theirs. I do not think that Walmart, thus far, has violated this code of conduct. I have seen a company which provides products at a lower cost to people who need them, a company who brings together a variety of products into one marketplace. It is ingenious and deserves to make lots of money.

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

Well, so lots of people like to say that Walmart is not contributing to the "common good." Whatever that means. Lots of people like to say that Walmart could stand to pay their employees more money, to offer them better benefits. I say, if people keep working there, they are valuing their time at the amount that Walmart has offered them, so it obviously is enough. Many people think that Walmart destroys smaller companies. I don't refute that; I only refute that destroying other companies is an immoral or unethical practice. It simply means that Walmart's ingenuity and helpfulness to the world exceed that of the other companies. "When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of *some* men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."

All the controversy about Walmart is just a sign that people don't understand that the most important part of capitalism is that the best man (or the best company) wins; the best company takes home the most money. The only unethical thing would be to try to govern in any way how much a company is allowed to earn, how much a company is allowed to produce. Every man has access to the world, and to his own ideas. If one man has a better idea than another, it just means he can use the resources provided by the world in a more efficient way than the man with the lesser ideas. I find it incredibly repulsive that the government would meddle in business affairs. I can't believe that the government would start its own little companies, instead of allowing privatization of industry to proceed naturally!

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."

Well, I'll let this issue rest, for now. I strongly oppose anyone who opposes big business. It is a sign that we are truly capitalistic and that man is truly noble.

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."

Sanction of the victim: professors

"Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors."
        -H.L. Mencken

I think that some of the smartest people I have ever met are professors.

Wait. I need to clarify. Many of the dumbest people I've ever met were professors. In fact, I believe the absolute dumbest man I ever ran across was a professor at the university where I study.

Anyway, there are some smart guys in there, too. Some of the greatest inventions have come about because some professor at a university somewhere spent long nights working on a problem with his graduate students. Some of our conveniences exist because a professor somewhere, or maybe a graduate student, had an itch to make some cool idea happen. By the way, "graduate student" is another way to say "slave." A graduate student is nothing more than a very smart person who is being paid the same as if he was working as a waiter, but is in fact working as a highly skilled engineer, designer, or analyst. A university is a business just as much as any other business you've ever heard of; they just try to hide it a little bit. And their low-level employees, the ones who do the grunt work and keep the company running, but get paid the least, are graduate students.

So anyway, I think that professors really get a raw deal. Most professors probably don't break a $100,000/yr paycheck. Don't get me wrong, that's lots of money. If you design something really great in a university setting, though, you usually don't end up getting the same compensation you could get in a business setting.

Imagine if Bill Gates had been a professor at a university when he created Windows. Imagine that Windows was a university-funded project, something basically owned by the university. Imagine that Windows ended up being just as popular as it is today, but Bill Gates didn't get the company and all that jazz. Instead, he kept getting a $200,000 paycheck every year. Doesn't that seem about equal to you? The amazing thing is that Bill Gates took a chance on his vision, on his own great idea, and made so much money that he can compete with royal families or the Rockefeller family, who have been amassing money for generations. Gates has more than them, and he did it in his own life time. That last observation is a page in the book of my buddy Rob Beck, but I thought it was insightful so I included it.

Well, this is the main reason that academia was never very appealing to me. The return that you get for really great research just seems really limited: you get to fly to a conference, watch a bunch of other really smart dudes talk about their projects, tell them about your own, and have job security.

Job Security. For some reason it's really important to have job security. I guess if you're not a risk-taker, and you just forget to leave school, you become a professor. I guess that taking the initial risk, doing research with no income for a while, is where the big money comes in. I lost my job a few months ago, and I admit that I was scared, because I didn't have another job lined up. I was terrified. But I think that anyone with a decent set of skills and some work ethic can find a job that at least pays the rent and provides food to eat.

Anyway, the reason I say "sanction of the victim" is because any of those guys could go do his own work somewhere and make a ton of money, but they all allow the University to push them around. They become the victims, but only because they are afraid to make major changes to their surroundings. They are the victims, but not at gunpoint. They are the victims because they choose to be. They sanction their own victim-hood! It's really sad, but at least we as a society get some cool stuff out of it, like the TLB in your L2 cache. I don't sanction taking from a man that which is most intimately his - his inventions, ideas, and creations - but if he throws it at me willingly, I don't sanction wasting it either.

To learn more about the whole "sanction of the victim" thing, I recommend reading a book or two by Ayn Rand. I just learned the other day that "Ayn" is not pronounced "Anne," but it's actually like the word "eye" with an 'n' on the end of it. Start with The Fountainhead, and then read Atlas Shrugged. Or, if you're a real book lover, start with "We the Living," then go to the other two.

I would only be a professor if I didn't care at all about money. I think I can make much more money being an entrepreneur than a professor. If you are doing it because you love it or because it is your life-long dream, that's respectable, but don't let the university push you around.

Don't support the machine, man!