Please, please, let us not start a "not Hacker News" meta-discussion. If you think this post is egregiously off-topic, flag it, don't complain in the thread.
If something doesn't interest people here it shouldn't get many up votes and not really be seen, obviously for an article to be sitting up the top it must interest a fair section of the community.
Something so viscerally horrible sets off an empathy reaction in many people, and it's not obviously off-topic as it is well-written, in-depth, and not something covered on TV news. Not to mention it does have a connection to entrepreneurship, capitalism, and general business.
It is also startup-relevant because it illustrates the "Wealth and power" section from Paul Graham's "How to Make Wealth" http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Wealth and Power
Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.
Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. [10] Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.
A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. [11] One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.
