[ExI] Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal

[Giovanni Santostasi]

Of course there is nothing wrong with owning a business (I owned 2
restaurants myself) and it can be a very creative and challenging work and
also beneficial to others (it should be).
What we are talking about is large corporations that are manipulating the
system to obtain unrestrained power and control over large number of people
with the results of increasing the corporation influence and power at the
price of decreasing the quality of life of millions of people, ruining the
environment, creating social unrest and so on.
Owing a business and running in a enlightened way, creating products that
are useful and good for the environment is a very useful enterprise.
Giovanni


On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2011/11/12 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> > 2011/11/11 Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> >>
> > The answer of course is power. Now, I may be more comfortable with the
> will
> > to power than others. What I am not comfortable with is that power be
> > allocated exclusively on the basis of your worth in dollars, to the
> > detriment of whatever other features and selective criteria one can
> imagine.
>
> I don't know that it is always power that motivates billionaires...
> (though with Soros, one could clearly make that argument
> persuasively.) Some that I know personally (Not Soros, I don't know
> him) are motivated by the many people who depend upon their company
> for making a living. That is, there is a responsibility to keep those
> people employed that they feel very acutely. In other words, they feel
> that if they stopped working, that the people working for their
> company (who made them rich) are owed a living in exchange for what
> they got from those employees.
>
> In addition, they feel a responsibility to their customers, who also
> made them rich. If they stopped working, they feel that they would
> leave their customers in a lurch.
>
> So this is a case of being owned by your company, as opposed to owning
> your company. This is very counter-intuitive to most people, who
> imagine that the life of the rich is sitting on cushions having grapes
> placed gently upon their tongues. Rich people are more often than not
> workaholics.
>
> I would make the argument that today even more important than money in
> power is reputation. I have virtually no money, but perhaps I have a
> little bit of a positive reputation... and maybe people listen, just a
> little bit, to what I have to say... And while I don't have the
> reputation of a Steve Jobs, I'm not bereft of reputation either. In
> the case of Jobs, money and reputation went together, but I would
> argue his power came more from reputation than from money. Can you
> disagree?
>
> -Kelly
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