this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I want to have a serious conversation on this if possible. As devil’s advocate, if I want to start a business that helps people, what would I have to do to not run afoul and garner this type of criticism? Are you indicating that I must relinquish my business once it gets too big and that I am only entitled to a certain amount of success? Are you indicating that I must pay my workers far beyond what the free market dictates they are worth? Trying to understand how those are my issues. It would seem to me that these would need to change with far reaching government policies. Those policies in many ways go against capitalist principles when you start to consider having to pay a janitor for a company hundreds of thousands of dollars if the company is successful and employees are paid in revenue share. That makes far less sense than the owner of the company reaping the benefit of their innovation. I would also argue that an entrepreneur will potentially use these earnings more interestingly than a janitor, potentially to start additional businesses that help the public by increasing offerings and jobs.
I don’t really have a direct reply to these ideas but I would like to point out an interesting example of a business model that addresses some of these concerns, that is the worker cooperative, where the workers have some portion of ownership of the company, either in revenue sharing or decision making.
Worker coops are wildly underappreciated. I'm a big fan of "workers' right to first refusal". If a business owner is selling, the workers have a given amount of time to match that offer and buy it themselves.
That's one of the main fallacies of capitalism apologia: assuming that the market is free and inherently fair.
In reality, the "market wage" is the lowest amount that the company can possibly get away with while retaining its workforce. Conversely, the market price for a product that workers buy is the HIGHEST profit margin possible without hurting sales and the number one priority is always profit for owners/shareholders.
As for the market being free, that's literally impossible: without the presence of government regulations and unions to constrict them, the most powerful forces constrict the less powerful.
You either have tyranny of the already rich and powerful corporations or limits to their freedom being imposed. The American system leans heavily towards the tyranny end, which severely stifles the freedom of workers.
What you said is not wrong. Each economic lever is a negotiation with sentiments. The government could impose more stringent regulations. I believe it has to with regard to monopoly-busting and possibly doing some salary-policing, but I don’t feel that the system should be thrown out. It has spawned countless innovations by providing the incentive that people can be rewarded handsomely for their creativity and entrepreneurship. If you don’t like corruption, vote it out.
There's another fallacy: equating innovation with incentive and incentive with money.
People will innovate for countless other reasons than financial compensation, the main reason being to improve the lives of themselves and others.
The inventors of synthesised insulin sold the patent to a public university for $1 because they never wanted anyone to die because they couldn't afford it. Predatorily capitalist big pharma sure put an end to THAT dream.
And voting out corruption is a good idea in principle, but in a two party (actually two private corporations masquerading as political parties) system that's as corrupt as the American one, it's very rare that you're even ALLOWED to vote for anyone who's not bought and paid for by billionaires and their corporations.
If you're paying your employees what they're worth (not the minimum the market will bear, but actually in line with the value they contribute), and you're still making Bezos money, then you're fleecing your customers.
There's no way to get to a billion dollars without 1) exploiting your labor and supply chain by taking advantage of capitalist forces to pay less than the value of their contribution or 2) exploiting your customers by taking advantage of capitalist forces to charge more than the value of your product. Usually both, to extreme degrees, enabled by monopolies, regulatory capture, collusion, and other capitalist tricks. That's not "a business that helps people".
No matter how "innovative" an entrepreneur is, the actual value of their product or service is generated by the people who actually do the work. Of course, you're entitled to the value that you personally create, but the best business idea in the world is worth exactly zilch without implementation. Bezos doesn't build those fulfillment centers, he doesn't manufacture the products, he doesn't pack the boxes, he doesn't drive the trucks, he doesn't program the website. He only has the wealth he does because he pays the people that generate the value of his company the absolute minimum that he can get away with, skimming a big slice of everyone's labor value for himself. That doesn't help the public.
You don’t give him enough credit. He worked extremely hard to make Amazon what it is today. Additionally, he took major risks to his credit where he convinced investors to fund a new form of supply chain. He is reaping the reward of taking entrepreneurial risks and creating something innovative. I don’t know how you can say that Amazon doesn’t help people. Their prices are in-line with the market and no one can touch their shipping costs. Their warehouse jobs are demanding, but they explain that to anyone getting into it. In time, the people will mostly be replaced by robots anyways. The employees want more money, but robots work for free. If anything, we should be very interested in potentially implementing UBI and a VAT on automation per Andrew Yang.
He did not work multiple billions of dollars hard. No one can possibly work multiple billions of dollars hard. Bezos is worth 157 billion, and he's 59 years old, which averages to over $10 million per day since he was 18. Are you seriously suggesting that he has done 100 times more work, every single day of his life, than someone making $100,000 does in a whole year? Sure, he had some good ideas, and deserves to be fairly compensated, but that's monstrously out of proportion.
Capitalism does not, and has never, fundamentally rewarded hard work. Capitalism, fundamentally, rewards having a bunch of money to buy the rights to the value of the hard work of others. The most reliable way to get rich in capitalism isn't even to have great business ideas, it's to be born with rich parents so you can buy lots of shares in a company, and then use your shares to demand the company prioritize maximum dividends and minimum employee compensation. The investors that actually contribute meaningful ideas are a coincidential minority at best.
Sure, UBI and VAT are valuable ideas, but the main problem is that the robots will be owned by rich investors who made their money by being born rich enough to throw money at ventures that made them richer.
The actual solution is vesting the employees who actually create value with shares of the means of production they use to create that value. When the workers are the shareholders, they are actually compensated for their hard work, and the problem solves itself.
Bezos is never going to reach out grab your hand and pull you up to sit beside him, the only result of you licking his boot so hard is a sore tongue, though ideally you'd choke, and stop enabling this hell for the rest of who don't actually get off on being exploited (nor on the fantasy of exploiting others)
He is being defended indirectly. I am defending capitalism. Sure we can make some reforms to improve salaries across industries, but the ultra wealthy serve a purpose too. People are claiming that they sit on their money, but they clearly do reinvest in new entrepreneurial ventures. The more wealthy, the more groundbreaking. It is great that Bezos invested in civilian space tourism. That will only strengthen innovation in the space sector, which is needed. The US space program results in many innovations that we use across other industries today. Elon is revolutionizing tunnel digging and maybe rail transport. Bill Gates is either trying to stave the spread of disease or working on thinning the population depending upon the content you read.
My take? The issue I have with the mega rich is that they (generalization here) aren't playing by the same rules as you or I. I don't have an issue, with not paying all of your employees 6 figures. Different jobs, skills, training, and capabilities are (and should be) worth different amounts of money. It's important that people with good ideas, or business capabilities have avenues of expanding, bettering themselves, and enjoying the fruits of their labor.
When you pay money to write rules that are favorable to you, you become the problem. Money in politics is the problem. Imo, that has enabled all of this. Don't have good healthcare? Likely it was lobbied for because someone wanted more money. Stuck in prison? Oh yeah, money in politics got you there. Minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation? Something, something trickledown-bullshit, money in politics. Kids killed in school constantly? Oh you know....FUCKING MONEY IN POLITICS.
Favorable can be lobbying against health & safety or environmental regulations because it impacts your bottom line. It is donating to political campaigns for tax cuts (you know, fucking bribery). It's blocking minimum wage hikes to secure your bottom line.
All of that said, how people sleep at night with absurd amounts of money and minimal charity is disgusting. I don't fault someone for enjoying an oppulant lifestyle.....I do fault someone for Scrooge McDucking and hoarding cash....for what? Bragging rights? Power?
TLDR: be gaddamn ethical about it.
This is a fair take.
Those philosophies are not the only way to do things. Workers don't have to be paid the minimum possible. At some point, wealth accumulation becomes so extreme that it's immoral, like when people have so much money that they could never possibly spend it and are spending $300 million on a new boat or whatever. Tax rates used to be much, much higher on wealthy people and they still were "reaping the benefit of their innovation". Even better than paying taxes would be giving the money to employees. Paying a janitor (not sure why that is your example of someone who is lesser) enough money to buy a house and pay for their children to go to college is not a waste. It's also how the economy works. Capitalists and the wealthy class in the US seem to think they can keep all the money and economically starve their employees without realizing that the public has to have enough money to buy their products.
Ideally, the market dictates salary in capitalism. This means that a worker can shop themselves around if you are not paying them enough. Where this has broken down a bit is in corporations intentionally and unintentionally colluding on appropriate pay for positions across an industry. The get consulting groups to indicate whether they are in line with industry practices. This can also result in employees getting pay bumps if a company has is having trouble retaining talent. If the government tries to break the organic model by imposing minimum pay rules, then it will hurt small businesses. If it creates a percentage system based upon company profits then you end up having your talent retire early. It is not really a tenable model to keep a business afloat. You would end up with these companies that exist and then go away because the employees have extracted all the wealth they need, so you wouldn’t have prolonged enterprises like Amazon that offer an extremely useful service because their wild success means that it becomes impossible to figure out how to hire people to new positions because the revenue share for one employee would far exceed what other companies could offer, so you have to somehow either find the best person ever for that position or some kind of hereditary system forms. The use-case doesn’t make much sense. If you simply cap the CEO’s salary and say that they are not allowed to make many multiples of standard employees and standard employees cannot make many multiples above the standards for their roles in the industry then maybe that would work, but it seems like an overreach of government.
If I need to pay my employees more because my company is more profitable, then the government is basically telling me that my cost of labor is far more expensive than my smaller competitors. It will result in only small new companies being able to invest in innovation at a large risk and big companies not having the capital to invest in the kind of research and development that only a large venture can do. Amazon spends ~$43B on R&D. If they had to pay tons more to employees, we wouldn’t have things like their streaming devices, content offerings, or warehouse and logistics improvements that allow for packages to arrive same or next day.
If your net worth breaks a billion dollars, you will garner this sort of criticism nearly no matter what you do with it. Bill Gates, at least recently, has been just about as close as you can be to a model philanthropist, and people still spit on his name regularly.
A few things that help though, would be A) paying workers higher than the federally mandated minimum amount that you can legally pay them without running afoul of labor laws, B) Reinvesting profit back into the company instead of paying yourself a gorillion dollar yearly bonus while the rest of the employees get a 2.5% cost of living raise, and C) donating to charitable causes or human rights groups.
But some CEO's (I won't say many, but definitely some) do all of these things and still come under public fire. Realistically, if you actually manage to hoard enough money to become a billionaire, you've already abandoned your morals. No human being needs that much money. By all means profit from your innovations and rake in enough to live a comfortable life off them, but when your take home pay for a month is 12x what your next best paid employee makes in a year, you're a motherfucker. Doubly so, when said employee is the one with boots on the ground and all the CEO is doing is signing papers and looking pretty for the shareholders.
In my opinion, there should never, ever ever, be a discrepancy of more than 5x the amount your lowest paid employee makes. If you're paying people 25k a year to do the work that runs your business, the guy at the top of the chain of command shouldn't make more than 125k. If you pay your guys 100k a year, sure, take home 500k a year if you've got the profits. Live comfortably. But when a company makes record breaking profits, turns around and cans half their staff, then pays the bigwigs a million dollar bonus while everyone else gets next to nothing, yeah, fuck you, fuck your product, and fuck your shareholders. If you look around there's been quite a lot of that going on recently.
I guess my point is, the act of dishonestly hoarding the money in the first place is what makes us hate the rich. If you made that money fair and square and you deserve it, man, more power to you. I don't think anyone is upset with Dolly Parton even though she's worth an estimated 650 million US dollars, because she sweat and bled for that money and hasn't taken to lording it over everyone else just because she can. Bezos invented a website and then rode it's coattails into the realm of the obscenely rich without hardly ever lifting another finger for it. So did Musk. And the better-than-thou attitude they get about it makes it so much worse.
Not all the rich are bad people, but for the most part, good people don't become rich. Not like that. It takes a certain amount of gleefully taking advantage of your fellow humans to get there. That remorseless exploitation is what we hate.
He modernized e-commerce logistics through taking a huge risk of setting up last-mile regional warehouses at significant cost then moved from books to everything. He created sophisticated business processes that accounted for demand and seasonality, then had the foresight to take his logistics software platform and even package its components as a service.
Basically he was lucky.
He played the game correctly. The American dream is capitalism. We can improve the rules across industries, but the idea that we should remove the winners is no fun. If you spend years building a business and exposing yourself to calculated risk, you should reap your reward.
No one says to stop all profits from a good idea altogether. It's about proportionality and what is realistic to ensure longtime functionality of the system.
This. No one working for a business is 399 times worth as much as any other employee. Not even the owner of that business. No one deserves to be filthy rich.
The idea that rich people are supposedly so many times more valuable than any other person is nothing more than the same old self-aggrandizement kings and pharaohs have shown in the past. It isn't that much different from believing you were somehow chosen by God to be above everyone else.
This is an easy question to answer. Look at Henry Ford and look at Bezos and his type (oh for example Walmart, etc). Ford wanted his workers to be able to afford the product he was making, and he even lost a landmark case because he was looking out for the best interest of his employees and his customers, from wikipedia:
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism
Rightly so! Such codified and celebrated greed and exploitation is the number one root cause of death and despair in the world right now, probably ever.
The devil doesn't need more volunteer advocates, he's got plenty of paid ones.
I don't think there is a simple answer to this question. Not bribing politicians for favours, not exploiting workers and not selling substandard goods might be considered a basic minimum. Beyond this, there have been businessmen who tried to help their employees (or society as a whole), such as Ernst Abbe of Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung and John Spedan Lewis of JLP / Waitrose.
WTF did I just read?
There is no reason for any indivitual or rich group to own the means of production and steal the benefits a worker produces, fuck the "free" market!
If I invent a means of production, why can’t I be rewarded for my creation?
Not sure if that guy is trolling or not, but you don't seem to be, so to answer that question you aren't who Engels and Marx were referring to in the communist manifesto. If you invent something, you could sell your invention, either in the form of plans which do take labor or for actual builds of that invention (also taking labor), that's you being rewarded. But Marxists also (usually) don't believe in intellectual property - it's not very intuitive but the idea here is if you trace any novel invention's steps leading up to it, it is never the product of one person but of society as a whole. An inventor consumes media, sees problems in society, may be educated by a lot of different people, essentially given the seeds for their novel invention from the rest of their society. What you then shouldn't be able to do with your invention is skim off the top of everybody who ever builds your invention or uses your invention, just by virtue of having invented it without having to actually put in any additional labor. And what somebody else in general shouldn't be able to do is give someone else money to build your invention on their land, and skim off the top of everybody who ever uses it.
This is all unrealistic ideals. Consider that in the case of Amazon it took around 15 years for Amazon to become really this huge. This doesn't come out of nothing, it comes out of the hard work and decisions of tons of people who have incentives to get rich and make the business plans to make the company succeed.
On one hand, the moment you make any of this public property, the quality will drop considerably and it'll collapse, because no one will ever gain anything by this business thriving. It's the same reason why governments' employees are well knowns for being lazy and slow once they get their jobs and can't be easily fired. I've seen that first hand in Germany.
On the other hand, consider that Amazon doesn't have a trade secret, really. There's nothing that other companies cannot do. There's no secret sauce here in this case, like you're suggesting with inventions.
Oh I wasn't really responding to OP's meme, just providing context for what that guy was asking. For what you're saying, I mean, maybe? I don't think it's a particularly good comparison to look at current government employees in the society we have and say that's what a Marxist society of workers would look like. The incentives are different because imo "job security" isn't that important in a society where people aren't being threatened with homelessness or starvation if they don't have a job. Even that bit has to tie into a lot of systems, it's a society wide change in perspective. I don't think either of us can honestly say definitively what would and wouldn't work.
I do think Amazon has a secret sauce, though, in the sense that they have privilege that other companies don't. At the time it started, it may have just been any other online store. They weren't the only ones. Now it's a well known brand, and they got there through burning a lot of money to aggressively get customers, then sellers, to only then profit. It took them almost a decade to become profitable, I don't think there's many businesses that could afford to not be profitable for that long. Their secret sauce when they were growing was tons of money that most companies don't have access to (which of course also gets you the best people since money is just about everyone's main incentive in the society we've built), now their secret sauce is their network. Because of how entrenched they are, you'd need a lot more money than they did to try to recreate it now.
because...!