> The boss used her capital and labor to put in place all the resources that enable you to work
Capital accrued through the exploitation (yes, that's the legal and technical term) of labour.
There is 0 evidence that we wouldn't have a more productive society overall, if capital was more uniformly distributed across society; enabling more individuals to work for themselves or in co-ops.
Capitalist organisation structures are a pyramid with a very small few at the top collecting the vast majority of generated value. I don't think even the staunchest capitalism proponents can argue that a CEO no matter how good, is generating millions of times more value than a line worker at any org. Yet that's the kind of income deltas we see.
And we already know what happens when capitalist orgs reach a certain size. Rent seeking. They direct their resources towards preventing anyone else from competing in their niche through regulation and other barriers to entry. 'Why don't you go off and do your own thing?' Because it takes several million dollars to overcome the barrier to entry and even take a shot in any profitable industry. Exactly the kind of capital that average people don't have with the currently massively skewed wealth distribution curve.
If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things.
tl;dr: your employer isn't doing you any favours by hiring you and exploiting your labour. The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to profitably exploit you while you don't, doesn't turn them into a charity.
> There is 0 evidence that we wouldn't have a more productive society overall, if capital was more uniformly distributed across society; enabling more individuals to work for themselves or in co-ops.
How would we maintain this equal distribution? Some people would invest their capital in tools, training, and trade. Other people would spend it on entertainment. Before you know it, bam! Inequality!
It only really takes two mechanisms. Simple progressive taxation with no loopholes, and investment into education which mostly removes the 'other people would spend it on entertainment' factor. There will always be some quantity of deadbeats, but the societal cost of providing them with a minimum standard of living is far smaller than the societal cost of putting the overwhelming majority of wealth/power into the hands of a tiny number of individuals.
I'm not advocating for evenly sharing all wealth between all people. I'm advocating for compressing the extreme outliers on both sides of the wealth distribution curve and uplifting the bottom 10% while also exponentially taxing the top 10%.
If we taxed the top 10% of income earners on a curve from 50% to 99% marginal tax rate for 90th to 99.9th percentiles respectively, pretty much all the major problems like expensive healthcare, poor infrastructure, lack of social safety nets, etc, would be completely financially covered with billions of dollars left to spend on other stuff. Instead we write PR-piece headlines every time some billionaire is 'charitable' and donates to some cause that he personally chose.
> If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things.
1. Read about lottery winners - that is a real life experiment on what people do with 5m dollars.
2. In first world countries, we all are given a mostly equal amount of extremely valuable years. How we use those hours matters.
> The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to profitably exploit you while you don't
Many business owners are just average people that were given zero capital by their family, instead betting their time and their own savings. “Capital” applies in some cases (inherited farm? France?) but it is radically wrong thinking for a significant number of “owners” that started out with the same random playing pieces as everyone else in this game.
If you hate “the man”, then work for a small business owned by someone dealt a similar hand in life as you were (if they will employ you - they tend to dislike being told they were born with everything on a silver platter).
Lottery winners are selected from the population of lottery players which probably skews toward impulsive consumption and away from entrepreneurialism.
"Capital accrued through the exploitation (yes, that's the legal and technical term) of labour."
I started my businesses with capital I accumulated by being "exploited".
"If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things."
For sure they would, "their own things" in most cases being a spending binge on who knows what, followed by someplace they could be "exploited" again.
So can we equeate the term 'offering employment' to 'offering exploitation'?
Unless exploited by force (slavery). The employed/expolited are free to find their true value by alternavtive means? Find another job - less exploitive, or make your own job.
There are many problems with capitalism, I would argue taxation, or more appropriately lack of taxation is a greater concern.
As for the scenario if everyone had 5m in their accounts in the morning, only the most foolish would quit their jobs as inflation would render the windfall as null and void.
We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.
57% of all americans have less than 1 paycheck worth of savings in their bank. They don't have the option to shop around for other work or invest in personal growth to attain their 'true value'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
> We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.
And eventually revolutions topple the structures where value has concentrated when wealth disparity gets too big, and the cycle begins again. After several risen and fallen civilisations/empires, maybe its time to try something other than the one strategy that we for sure know the outcome of.
We don't need to be all equally well off, but we do need to compress the top and bottom 10% of the income disparity curve. No one on this planet should have billions of dollars in personal wealth, and no one on this planet should be too poor to afford shelter healthcare and food.
You've changed your comment while I was typing: youu mentioned a delta between CEOs and average workers. But we're likely to share common ground. Your new comment regarding revolutions. Not so fast!
The Chinese sufffered the same problems of inequallity and the plebs made the same comparisons - for centuries.
So a delta is to be expected, the magnatude I'm not sure if that matters as CEOs are outliers. I think the point you are leaning to is:
despite working full time, the average US resident cannot afford what we perceive to be a 'good quality of life' (many people from developing countries will find that statement hard to believe). This is subjective, and not likely an issue of labour being exploitative.
It is a question on what type of a society Americans want (and vote for), which is an entirely different discussion covering taxation, education, health care, corpotate political donations/lobbying etc.
From a market perspective the delta represents supply and demand.
I didn't change my comment. The only edit I made was to separate a para for formatting. Maybe you were reading something else.
From a market perspective the delta has nothing to do with supply/demand. Microeconomics and supply/demand theory doesn't really have any answers to the fact that wealth and power tends to acrete. The textbook answer will be along the lines of 'but then smaller more agile entities will arise that displace the incumbents' but the incumbents have long ago figured out strategoes such as rent seeking to prevent that.
Capitalism is fundamentally broken in several clear ways:
* It assumes that individuals are rational actors who are sufficiently informed to make generally optimal self-interest decisions
* It assumes that there's a force or mechanism to modulate or prevent acretion of wealth. So far the only such mechanism historically has been bloody revolutions
* It assumes that we know the 'true value' of things including externalities. The climate crisis is a huge example of how utterly wrong that is. If car and fossil fuel costs accounted for externalities, they'd cost somewhere in the vicinity of 10-100x more than they currently do. Would that have prevented the boom that led to current quality of life in the developed world? Probably. Would it also have prevented an existential threat to us? Certainly.
The pursuit of continuous growth has become clearly a self-terminal strategy that not only failed multiple times in history before, but is threatening our entire species via anthropogenic climate change now.
I'm advocating that we stop pursuing continuous growth and focus on collapsing the insane wealth disparity and dismantling the structures that have acreted unprecedented wealth and power into the hands of <100 people worldwide.
Someone who acreted sufficient wealth to extract profit from your labour more effectively than you can alone, is not doing you favours, is not being charitable, but merely exploiting you to acrete more wealth to exploit more people ad infinitum.
It's only threatening our species coz space research was quite purposefully stalled while old world global political tensions were simmering at their hottest.
Once there is an off-planet colony i expect the resource pressure that is starting to show will ease up considerably. Capturing asteroid/mining other planets for resources - there are a lot of ways for things to course correct. Everything we're facing right now is coz of an artifical bottleneck in our species expansion
It will also render existential threats moot coz there will be off planet resources to rebuild a civilization in case things do go catastrophically wrong.
Wow, a hundred million times minimum wage in the US should be something like, I don't know, a trillion dollars per year? That's amazing! I can surely understand why people are so upset about income equality now.
Capital accrued through the exploitation (yes, that's the legal and technical term) of labour.
There is 0 evidence that we wouldn't have a more productive society overall, if capital was more uniformly distributed across society; enabling more individuals to work for themselves or in co-ops.
Capitalist organisation structures are a pyramid with a very small few at the top collecting the vast majority of generated value. I don't think even the staunchest capitalism proponents can argue that a CEO no matter how good, is generating millions of times more value than a line worker at any org. Yet that's the kind of income deltas we see.
And we already know what happens when capitalist orgs reach a certain size. Rent seeking. They direct their resources towards preventing anyone else from competing in their niche through regulation and other barriers to entry. 'Why don't you go off and do your own thing?' Because it takes several million dollars to overcome the barrier to entry and even take a shot in any profitable industry. Exactly the kind of capital that average people don't have with the currently massively skewed wealth distribution curve.
If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things.
tl;dr: your employer isn't doing you any favours by hiring you and exploiting your labour. The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to profitably exploit you while you don't, doesn't turn them into a charity.