[ExI] Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal

[Kelly Anderson]

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