Are you claiming that money does not have diminishing marginal utility? (i.e., the famous "s-curve"; it's in AIMA but I can't find a convenient picture with Google.)
If you're the usual person that economics tries to model, then yes, money has diminish marginal utility that drops off quickly. The value of money drops off for everyone. If you ask me, 170 million doesn't buy a whole lot of votes in Congress. But this is irrelevant.
What's valuable is the ability to create money, not the money itself. Investing is hard. You could probably ask pg about how hard it is. These guys had a really good investment, and these guys, bright as they are, may have very well killed their golden goose.
It sounds like you're saying that society does not have a diminishing marginal utility of money, and/or that they shouldn't have axed the golden investment opportunity for everyone (had they IPOed). Is that right?
The marginal utility of money is presumably diminishing for any entity. But the curve is stretched when you look at the whole of society (or any larger group) rather than an individual, for two reasons. 1. Having $1M isn't 1000 times as good as having $1K, but giving $1K to 1K people is about 1000 times as good as giving $1K to one person if all the people matter roughly equally. You're not moving so far along their utility curves. 2. There may be big projects that deliver lots of value at very high cost. (The fact that this is possible is basically a consequence of #1.)
I'm not sure this has very much to do with whether the Mint guys would have done better to keep going independently rather than taking the $170M, though.
