Comment by arjie

Everyone has their own objectives for life, but I actually don't think that the purpose of a state is to provide the instantaneous highest quality of life, safety and health to its citizens. Some might argue that it is to provide those things not at a sampled time but over a duration, but if so which generation should experience that? And if optimized over generations then surely some people must lose so that future others must gain, or the future others must lose to that the present ones may gain.

Personally, I think a higher goal for the state is to provide a substrate of sufficient physical safety, law and order, and infrastructure so that its citizens may have the ability to pursue their aspirations. I think human thriving is very important. And I want the ability to try at a ridiculous thing and achieve commensurate reward. In many ways, I don't even want that for me. I want that for others. When I see someone take a crack at something that most thought impossible and make it happen, I love it.

It isn't that those of us who have this opinion are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. It's that we like that someone took a crack at something absurd and became billionaires for it. People who don't get it always say these things out of misunderstanding: "Why do the poor in the US vote so often against their own interests?". The obvious answer is "because they are principled and not purely self-interested".