The first thing I think of when I ask someone at Lowe's where the weather strippings are and they ask me what that is, is that they deserve forty thousand dollars.
No it's not. The labor couldn't have happened unless someone invested in the factories, the rents, the business model, the materials, the worksites, out of a risk for a return.
That's a labor of its own and I guess it doesn't matter to you?
I guess if they're entitled to all of it then they're responsible for running the business too and incurring all the debt if the business fails right?
setting up and running a business is labour too, so obviously the people who do that kinda stuff are entitled to compensation, just like the people who work for the business.
however, the way things are currently set up, the owners and managers of businesses get compensated to a degree that is disproportionate to their contribution to the value that the business creates, leaving less for the workers than they deserve.
add to that that some of the revenue is used to pay shareholders who do not contribute anything at all to the business, and it is easy to see that the system is deeply unfair.
Okay, so what happens if you invest in a factory amd set everything up, and nobody works there? Nice profits ay?
Nobody is saying whoever invested in creating the business shouldnt be rewarded at all. They are saying that the distribution of profits should be fairer. Like it or not, no business works without the workers no matter how good your idea is.
I never said that. I was countering the idea the labor is entitled to all the value it creates when its existence is being paid for by people providing the means for its productivity.
Capital is not labour, and that investment means fuck-all if you don't have anyone doing the actual work at the end of the day.
Starting a business is work, sure - but it doesn't entitle to 14 billion more than 301,000 other people. Not by a long shot, ever. NO ONE's labour is worth even 1 billion dollars. It is such a disproportionately inconceivable amount of wealth.
I never said that the investment could mean anything without the labor. I said that in most, if not all situations does labor for things not have any productivity without investment, whether it's the person doing it or a business owner who starts a business.
You can piss about with ideas about what someone's labor is worth or what someone business is worth when at the end of the day, it's not up to you. Value is subjective, as it always has been. Laws of economics.
Additionally, workers lack the financial obligations and risks that business men take, which is another reason that they are more financially compensated. Businesses are a ship. If the ship goes down, the crew gets lifeboats to get to shore, but the captain goes down with it.
There's lots of reasons I could list why businessmen disproportionately make more wealth with their businesses through the amount of financial management that they do and extreme risks that are taken with their financial goals, but I don't think reddit allows long posts anymore.
When businesses go down, the workers are out of jobs and the CEOs and shareholders get golden parachutes; screw off with that nonsense about all the "risks". That stuff is completely untrue for anything above and beyond the local mom and pop shop level of business.
CEOs hardly do *any* labour, and certainly nothing that is any way in the slightest worth orders of magnitude more than the people on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder.
No one earns a billion dollars, period. They steal it.
A lot of people like to posit the idea that all business owners get "Golden parachutes" but many businesses do not declare bankruptcy or foreclose on loans until they're usually several hundred thousand dollars in debt.
Declaring bankruptcy is a hefty decision and a very final one, especially with a business that may or may not have been failing for a long time where any real income made from it has to go to debt financing, which can be hundreds upon thousands of dollars that they do not possess. A lot of times, they end up having to work off that debt for years. Don't underestimate how financially screwed people can be if they reach this state.
A worker for a business will never have to experience this beyond being laid off, which is the whole point that you missed. Being laid off means you have to find a new job, being in debt means you're fucked.
All of the excuses you're making fly in the face of the fact that rich people are inconceivable better-off than the rest of us and all but isolated from any real negative consequences in their lives and most folks are only one tiny emergency away from being homeless.
Besides organizing the business model, paying the taxes, rents, fees, paying off loans taken out to finance the business and pay people back, literally invest their own personal money into it if all else fails, dealing with inspections, both hiring and dealing with lawyers and possible lawsuits (lawyers aren't cheap), and bearing all of the financial burden where the economic circumstances force them to.
Not all labor is physical. And nobody just earns a billion dollars, if you're talking about net worth, you clearly don't understand what net worth is.
No billionaire has a billion dollars sitting in a bank like Scrooge McDuck. Net worth is the total sum of asset valuations over the span of a career. If someone is worth a billion dollars as their net worth, that's because they were valued that based on economic valuations of the totality of their career productivity.
You either don't know what a CEO is, or you don't care, because you don't seem to understand net worth either.
More justifications for how rich people don't *really* have all that money...meanwhile they never have to worry about making rent or whether they can get that weird lump checked out or making sure they can eat this week, while ordinary folks do, constantly.
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u/dillvibes 5d ago
The first thing I think of when I ask someone at Lowe's where the weather strippings are and they ask me what that is, is that they deserve forty thousand dollars.