RichardGibbons

I'm curious why you say this. Typically, universal healthcare results in lower healthcare costs than to the USA. And, knowing that your family won't die because of lack of healthcare coverage during your business' startup phase would surely remove one barrier to potential entrepreneurs.

Funny, I do the same for the exact same reason.

I'm both happy and unhappy about it. I'm happy from the perspective that one of the biggest benefits to humanity is what we get for "free" from other people doing great things. Like, it's pretty amazing to me that, when I was young, no households had computers, and now I can have the internet and an incredibly powerful smart phone in my hand at a price almost anyone can afford. That survival rates with all sorts of medical issues have skyrocketed. That so many benefits to my life and others have come without me actually doing anything at all to make it happen. Rather this all happened because resources flow to the people who are able to use them effectively. Those people are incentivized to make billions and everyone in the entire world benefits from their work, without lifting a finger themselves. And then, when billionaires die, those resources largely then flow back into society, to be recycled into some brilliant person making the next amazing thing. So, it makes me pretty happy that this exist--that everyone on earth benefits so much from this system. Joe gets the smart phone, Joe get the cure for cancer, and Joe gets the longer lifespan, even if Joe is nowhere near bright enough to invent a smart phone himself. On the other hand, it makes me unhappy that many people will look at charts like this and say, "the world is broken because some people have much more than others". Such charts encourage envious people to destroy the system that incentivizes humanity to create so many wondrous things that benefit everyone. It makes people think that completely unreasonable and illogical actions are somehow justified.

LOL! I'm awesome!

I don't think you should be surprised at this, John. Luke's been one of the most consistent people on the forum. I don't think I've ever seen him move even a step away from his core position that large authoritarian regimes that crush their own citizens are completely good, and democracies and free markets are completely bad. It's very clear that if Russia invades Germany, his position will be that it's both a good thing and that Germany deserves it.

This is the key flaw in Gates' thinking: "The tax system could be more progressive without damaging significantly the incentive to do fantastic things." He asserts this, but it seems extremely implausible to me. I'd love to actually hear Gates' reasoning about why people's incentives aren't dramatically impacted by the chance to become rich, why moderately successful companies will be equally likely to grow and innovate when they're confiscated from the founders who were responsible for them growing and innovating, and why obliterating the venture capital market won't have an impact on innovation.

I'm not sure if my anecdote is useful, but I'll share anyway. I roughly did this, and though the periods aren't long I suspect the results are statistically significant. In the seven years before retirement, my returns almost exactly matched the S&P 500. In the eleven years afterwards, my compounded annual returns were about 6.5 percentage points better than the S&P 500. (Also, my total returns typically included some cash, fixed income and different currencies, so it's not a total apples-to-apples comparison.) That said, I think it's still pretty hard to determine causality and attribute difference to any one thing. I do try to refine mental models and improve strategies. So, it's unclear to me the extent to which my investing decisions would have diverged over time if I'd chosen a different path and had continued working. (Also, if an all-knowing deity inspected my portfolios and strategies, I'd be pretty surprised if the "expected" out-performance is 6.5 percentage points. I have a feeling that maybe the expected out-performance is a few percentage points, and the rest was luck.)

Well, the thing is, refuting you with an obvious counter-argument isn't actually twisting things. I get that you want to completely limit the scope of the discussion because that's the only way that you can pretend your arguments make sense. But that's not actually how the world, or discussions, work. I mean, look at this: Yeah, the majority of people in Russia didn't get murdered. You're making an argument that because the majority of people in Russia didn't get murdered by the state, it's cool.

This cracks me up. Putin murders a bunch of people who speak out against him politically, then Luke explains that free speech is relatively unnecessary because the large majority is politically relatively uninterested. Can't imagine why the large majority of people would be politically uninterested after seeing their politically interested friends murdered....

Well, there was an unprovoked attack on a European nation by a country historically known for its expansionary tendencies. Not really surprising that European defence spending increased....

Well, that's just because China's strategy is awful. All evidence we have suggest free-market, liberal, rule-of-law economies are the most successful in raising the standard of living of a nation. China isn't doing that, so the evidence we have--and even the evidence we have from China itself--suggests that their outcomes will be poor.

The negative outcomes from having a "victim complex" has substantial scientific support from locus of control studies. People with an internal locus of control have both higher savings rates and higher earnings. In contrast, people who believe that the world is largely responsible for their outcomes or that outcomes are just a matter of luck tend to have lower savings rates and earnings.

This is quite interesting to me, because I'm starting to consider death-related things, but haven't thought about it from this perspective (more from the simplistic "let's reduce probate fees" perspective.) It does make me wonder if I should have a theoretical incremental return hurdle to clear when thinking about adding complexity.

FWIW, this is a misunderstanding of evolution. Lots of stuff gets passed on that didn't aid our ancestor's survival and reproduction. All something needs to be passed on is to not be catastrophic before reproduction.

I think this is the key point for why Jews would say that. Canada and the USA turning away refugee ships is pretty telling. And it's pretty telling that, when asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada, the response was, "None is too many." With things like that, how could one not believe that the western world largely abandoned European Jews to genocide?