&gt; Again, everybody is square in the deal.<p>Only if you take the surrounding system as given.<p>The original question was this:<p>&gt; Put another way, if you founded a company, created thousands of jobs for families and individuals, and made a fortune, why should the state be the one who decides what happens with your money?<p>And the answer is that the state gets to decide what happens with the money, because if not for people banding together into nations, creating a state, taxing people, and using those taxes to enrich their nation over centuries, eventually reaching a state where a large part of a continent on this planet is occupied by some 300 million people, speaking the same language, using the same currency, having computers, wanting to connect, and therefore creating a niche for a social network to grow so big that its founder could employ thousands of people and amass a fortune.<p>No deal is ever squared in our society. We are continuously using the amassed production of the past, and paying it forward.<p>&gt; This thinking is so poisonous and destructive and pervasive that I&#x27;m starting to wonder if it is either due to some natural law of human nature or some grand conspiracy to destroy modern society.<p>You have it backwards. If modern society is destroyed, it would prove the point, because we wouldn&#x27;t have twenty-something computer-whiz billionaires for a very long time, not until we&#x27;ve rebuilt all of this again.