“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
You assume this is one-sided. For example how about for once we detail the two positions on immigration accurately. Each is of course misguided, and neither is moral by the standards of people using the position.
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
I think the fatal error is using immigration as the key rubric.
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
Conspiracist nonsense lapped up by base populists.
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
Which part is incorrect? I invite you to actually address my claims instead of degrading the quality of debate.
Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
> Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
> No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
> I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
Even if they had no power at all, they'd still be forced to suck up to the authoritarian Trump regime. They have to, because he's petty and vindictive and they rationally don't want to be wrecked by a narcissistic authoritarian.
>However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!).
This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity. And if you check the correlations on standard of living and wealth inequality, you'll see it not only implies it but to some degree implies the opposite. (Obviously, it is more complicated than that alone, and increasing the floor would at this time require raising taxes in a way that evens things out more.)
> Even if they had no power at all, they'd still be forced to suck up to the authoritarian Trump regime. They have to, because he's petty and vindictive and they rationally don't want to be wrecked by a narcissistic authoritarian.
Sure, but it goes both ways. Musk didn't need to take the chance to wreck government mechanisms that are supposed to be a check on his companies. Altman et al don't need to lecture world leaders at the G7, etc etc. All of those are active choices.
> This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity
This is where we disagree. Wealth isn't some objective number in isolation. Sure, getting everyone out of poverty is amazing and one has to commend societies that achieve that - most notable example here would be China over the past few decades.
But the key thing to understand here is that wealth is a social relation, not some sort of pure material thing. If you were the only person on the planet, technically I guess you would own it all, but I'm sure you understand that statement would be meaningless. What makes wealth interesting is that it is formalized power over.
It's what makes the cleaner clean the well-off persons toilet because they wouldn't be able to afford food otherwise. It's how the middle aged white guy gets to sleep with the young Thai girl because she's worried about her mother's medical bills.
I would posit that that social relation is the injustice that requires solving once a base of material comfort is met. Raising the floor isn't enough. Removing the twisted power games is the only way to have a society that isn't deeply extractive and counter to human dignity.
Similarly, think about the example you've given with the 5 billionaires and everyone else pretty well off. What could those five make the rest do?Can they use their own resources to make somebody else not-well-off?If so, what does that say about the power structures of the society they live in?What does that mean for freedom, for self-actualization?
The discussion was originally about Altman. If we're going to discuss Musk: sure, he is an absolutely horrible person and political figure in myriad ways. Arguably one of the worst people alive, in some ways. (Despite his laudable business achievements and some public goods like Starlink.)
One can't lump together Altman and Musk. (Plus they despise one another.) Or lump together all tech CEOs or all billionaires.
The rest of your post is incorrect, zero-sum thinking. There is not a fixed pie which people take proportional slices out of. That's not how wealth or the economy work. Nor are relative wealth differences the most important thing people care about. People somewhat care about making more or less money than their neighbor, but they care even more about their absolute standard of living and material conditions.
Some thoughts on this topic that I agree with, by the creator of this website:
As for concentration of power in societies: so long as there is still democracy and some laws preventing ultra-wealthy people from influencing politics through completely corrupt means (directly bribing politicians), it's not necessarily a big deal, if everyone already has great lives. The issue with people like Peter Thiel is they publicly say they dislike democracy, whereas someone like Sam Altman publicly (and I suspect privately) supports democracy.
> The rest of your post is incorrect, zero-sum thinking. There is not a fixed pie which people take proportional slices out of. That's not how wealth or the economy work. Nor are relative wealth differences the most important thing people care about. People somewhat care about making more or less money than their neighbor, but they care even more about their absolute standard of living and material conditions.
Yes, but we are talking about a potential scenario where the material conditions are "abundance". That factor is just... met at some point. Then only the other factor remains.
With that in mind, I would invite you to revisit your prior hypothetical and ask yourself the questions I mentioned earlier:
> What could those five make the rest do? Can they use their own resources to make somebody else not-well-off? If so, what does that say about the power structures of the society they live in? What does that mean for freedom, for self-actualization?
Once the material floor is met, these are the kinds of questions and concerns that are left. What do you make of them?
> However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
That is indeed alarmist, at least. If you define wealth in a really stupid way you can get to that statement, but it has to be a really stupid way.
You mean they can give away ownership of companies in exchange for things? I suppose so, but can you give me a for instance? Elon Musk swaps half of his SpaceX stake for something?
With that in mind, it's a bit unfortunate you're not willing or able to share any evidence for your beliefs with us and I fear it might make it hard for the rest of us to take them seriously - right now they mostly read as bad-faith trolling and derailment.
Let me know once you feel ready to have a fact-based conversation - for now, I'll leave you to your ad hominems and bold unfounded assertions.
> Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
No. I think you'll find that certainly when it comes to effective ownership, the US is more equal, not less, than most 3rd world countries. In a way, it is still far more equal than Europe.
People don't know this, because this is heavily deemphasized, but it's second or third world countries where you find absurd wealth absurdly concentrated, not the US. Of course, if anything that's still an argument in favor of redistribution. Relative equality, even compared to Europe, but certainly compared to Africa or India or the Middle East or Asia, was what built the US. Let's get back to that.
Even now, even compared to Europe, you can say the US is more equal in that the US rich are "young" families. In Europe, there was some wealth redistribution among the ultra-rich in the 20th century ... but that happened due to and through WW2.
Most Euroepan ultra-rich families are like the Von Der Leyens. Nobody in her family has been living in anything less than a castle for over 800 years. Her family has been wealthy for over 3 times the total lifetime of the US, and her family became wealthy as the result of a "free city" grant ... by the Holy Roman Empire (essentially a tax break, just centuries ago)
If you go to a luxury hotel in Kinshasa or Manila you'll see what I mean. There is of course luxury in America, but nothing compared to what exists there. Hotels have malls that locals can't get into (and are thus almost entirely empty). Locals are deferent to you, to an extreme extent (talk about something you never see in the US), and other locals hate you for it. Restaurants are cleared by the police (Kinshasa) just because 5 westerners want to eat there. And so on.
And places like Africa and Asia are an order of magnitude worse and that is still the case.
k310 · · focus · HN ↗
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
<a href="https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/" rel="nofollow">https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
spwa4 · · focus · HN ↗
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
JuniperMesos · · focus · HN ↗
No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
> I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
[0] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hassabis-us-ai-coalition-g7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hass...
[1] <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/what-percent-of-the-worlds-wealth-is-controlled-by-billionaires/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
>However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!).
This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity. And if you check the correlations on standard of living and wealth inequality, you'll see it not only implies it but to some degree implies the opposite. (Obviously, it is more complicated than that alone, and increasing the floor would at this time require raising taxes in a way that evens things out more.)
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, but it goes both ways. Musk didn't need to take the chance to wreck government mechanisms that are supposed to be a check on his companies. Altman et al don't need to lecture world leaders at the G7, etc etc. All of those are active choices.
> This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity
This is where we disagree. Wealth isn't some objective number in isolation. Sure, getting everyone out of poverty is amazing and one has to commend societies that achieve that - most notable example here would be China over the past few decades.
But the key thing to understand here is that wealth is a social relation, not some sort of pure material thing. If you were the only person on the planet, technically I guess you would own it all, but I'm sure you understand that statement would be meaningless. What makes wealth interesting is that it is formalized power over.
It's what makes the cleaner clean the well-off persons toilet because they wouldn't be able to afford food otherwise. It's how the middle aged white guy gets to sleep with the young Thai girl because she's worried about her mother's medical bills.
I would posit that that social relation is the injustice that requires solving once a base of material comfort is met. Raising the floor isn't enough. Removing the twisted power games is the only way to have a society that isn't deeply extractive and counter to human dignity.
Similarly, think about the example you've given with the 5 billionaires and everyone else pretty well off. What could those five make the rest do? Can they use their own resources to make somebody else not-well-off? If so, what does that say about the power structures of the society they live in? What does that mean for freedom, for self-actualization?
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
One can't lump together Altman and Musk. (Plus they despise one another.) Or lump together all tech CEOs or all billionaires.
The rest of your post is incorrect, zero-sum thinking. There is not a fixed pie which people take proportional slices out of. That's not how wealth or the economy work. Nor are relative wealth differences the most important thing people care about. People somewhat care about making more or less money than their neighbor, but they care even more about their absolute standard of living and material conditions.
Some thoughts on this topic that I agree with, by the creator of this website:
<a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
<a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html
<a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html
<a href="https://x.com/paulg/status/2089044855158956533" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/paulg/status/2089044855158956533
<a href="https://x.com/paulg/status/2052510098035998846" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/paulg/status/2052510098035998846
As for concentration of power in societies: so long as there is still democracy and some laws preventing ultra-wealthy people from influencing politics through completely corrupt means (directly bribing politicians), it's not necessarily a big deal, if everyone already has great lives. The issue with people like Peter Thiel is they publicly say they dislike democracy, whereas someone like Sam Altman publicly (and I suspect privately) supports democracy.
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but we are talking about a potential scenario where the material conditions are "abundance". That factor is just... met at some point. Then only the other factor remains.
With that in mind, I would invite you to revisit your prior hypothetical and ask yourself the questions I mentioned earlier:
> What could those five make the rest do? Can they use their own resources to make somebody else not-well-off? If so, what does that say about the power structures of the society they live in? What does that mean for freedom, for self-actualization?
Once the material floor is met, these are the kinds of questions and concerns that are left. What do you make of them?
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
That is indeed alarmist, at least. If you define wealth in a really stupid way you can get to that statement, but it has to be a really stupid way.
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
vrganj · · focus · HN ↗
With that in mind, it's a bit unfortunate you're not willing or able to share any evidence for your beliefs with us and I fear it might make it hard for the rest of us to take them seriously - right now they mostly read as bad-faith trolling and derailment.
Let me know once you feel ready to have a fact-based conversation - for now, I'll leave you to your ad hominems and bold unfounded assertions.
spwa4 · · focus · HN ↗
No. I think you'll find that certainly when it comes to effective ownership, the US is more equal, not less, than most 3rd world countries. In a way, it is still far more equal than Europe.
People don't know this, because this is heavily deemphasized, but it's second or third world countries where you find absurd wealth absurdly concentrated, not the US. Of course, if anything that's still an argument in favor of redistribution. Relative equality, even compared to Europe, but certainly compared to Africa or India or the Middle East or Asia, was what built the US. Let's get back to that.
Even now, even compared to Europe, you can say the US is more equal in that the US rich are "young" families. In Europe, there was some wealth redistribution among the ultra-rich in the 20th century ... but that happened due to and through WW2.
Most Euroepan ultra-rich families are like the Von Der Leyens. Nobody in her family has been living in anything less than a castle for over 800 years. Her family has been wealthy for over 3 times the total lifetime of the US, and her family became wealthy as the result of a "free city" grant ... by the Holy Roman Empire (essentially a tax break, just centuries ago)
If you go to a luxury hotel in Kinshasa or Manila you'll see what I mean. There is of course luxury in America, but nothing compared to what exists there. Hotels have malls that locals can't get into (and are thus almost entirely empty). Locals are deferent to you, to an extreme extent (talk about something you never see in the US), and other locals hate you for it. Restaurants are cleared by the police (Kinshasa) just because 5 westerners want to eat there. And so on.
And places like Africa and Asia are an order of magnitude worse and that is still the case.