Guatemala riots over budget, set fire to congress building over healthcare.
- Thread starter crimson5pheonix
- Start date
Any answer about Sumeria would have twisted the Gordian knot he's made yet more since the whole concept of 'advanced societies' requiring modern notions of property rights, and such being unique to 'advanced societies' is historically illiterate. Apart from that, Sumeria very obviously had exploitation of one or more working classes, as did plenty of other places that almost certainly would not be called 'advanced' by someone like Iron.
Trade and currency systems allow a person to sustain their own life by providing equal or greater value to those the others that provide for them.
I mean, that not true at all. Did Bill Gates ever provide billions of dollars of value to the economy? Like I could understand millions. But billions? Also, he didn’t do much of the actual work. Shouldn’t the rewards go to the people who did the work? Does that give him a right to change laws to give him more profits? Because that doesn’t sound right either
And that's why farmers, pharmaceutical workers, and power plant operators are the most highly paid people on the planet!
Followed closely by garbage pick-up.
Gates literally stole every idea he had and his greatest increases in wealth were built on the abuse of copyright law and an actually prosecuted case of anti-trust law violation. He’s still basically the wealthiest man alive if one includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of his wealth (which one should given it is actually an astoundingly profitable investment fund).
Private ownership of productive assets, especially assets that were owned in common before, allows a capitalist to prevent people from sustaining their own lives by enclosing available productive land.
Do you have a job? Does it allow you to buy things you could not personally produce? On a small scale, trade and currency allow me to use my very narrow set of skills and meet all of my own needs, I don't have to grow food or practice medicine, I only have to do the one thing. Sure, the consequence of this is that people can theoretically acquire wealth enough to do nothing but distribute it for the rest of their lives, but that's a hell of a lot better than Revnak's "the land is free, grow your own food, and everyone will be happy forever".
All their conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and ramblings that people can't provide for themselves because of capitalism are hot nonsense.
The problem is that I can do math. I can see how much I earn for the company and how little my pay packet is. There is a discrepancy
You don't have to be a communist to realise that wealth redistribution happens in the company first. And its broken. The government redistribution is in fact to rectify this discrepancy. I actually don't want governments to redistribute wealth but... its a necessary evil to let capitalism function. Without it, companies and CEOs would strangle the economy until no one has anything. Without wealth redistribution by governments, capitalism would have failed already
What are you talking about conspiracy. Do you think Bill Gates, or any CEO, lobby to change laws to help their bottom line? How has Gates earnt his money - Through legal proper Capitalist methods or underhanded ones that don't follow Capitalism's rules?
It's not that I disagree with you in large party, but I think the issue of distribution, and thus redistribution, is an interesting one. How much value added has Bill Gates created for the world? This is effectively unanswerable, because it's not possible to measure. So how does he have over 100 billion dollars?
Distribution (and redistribution) aren't really representations of real productivity so much as they are representations of power. And that is a much more sobering thought. Power is wealth, wealth is power. A society with huge wealth inequality is a society with huge power imbalance. And the current ructions, even particularly amongst the right, are in large part fears of disempowerment.
When we also factor in ownership, and that ownership grants power and lack of ownership denies it, we can think about Revnak's position. More and more of the world is owned, and the more that is owned, the more people have to effectively "rent" to survive. Many salaries jobs are in practice renting the means to carry out the work because the jobs could not be done with the space / equipment provided. More and more land is owned; these days we protect land from exploitation by it being owned, so even publicly accessible land, once commons, is now owned. And perhaps in some way, we outside the capitalism class are in fact just getting weaker and weaker.
But there is a discrepancy in both directions. That's how trade generates wealth. The money they pay you is less than they make off of it, yes, that it how they profit off your employment. The money they pay you is also worth more to you than the value of the time and effort you spend working (or else you wouldn't be working that job). Both parties gain value in the exchange. Like when someone buys a hamburger, the value of that is a perceived value. it might be worth $1.00 to the person who made it and $5.00 to the person who wants to eat it, and by selling it for $3.00 both parties have gained equally in value by there own personal measurement.
The anti-capitalists here pretend economics is zero-sum, and act as though if one person benefits it is at the expense of others, and there are certainly cases where that happens that people have collective interest in preventing, but a good trade benefits both parties.
That was reference to Revnak claiming Gates has never done anything of value and stole everything he has.
I have no doubt that Microsoft has provided several multiples of value to society at large over the revenue it's taken in. I have little doubt that the people who've worked for Microsoft are, by-and-large, better off than they would be if they hadn't worked for Microsoft. If the employees and customers are all better off for Microsoft existing, I'm not inclined to worry about how much the founder has benefited as a result.
Ownership is power, sure. But it's only power if you use it. Nobody cares if you own something and do nothing with it, it only has power when used for the benefit of others.
Most people have a collective interest in preventing that happening. A small number of other people, with enormous political and financial power and reach in the media, have a vested interest in perpetuating those imbalances, because they're precisely the ones who are benefitting.
The employee has very little choice: they have to work to make rent and afford food and bills. They earn relatively little in monetary terms, but the paycheque is an absolute necessity to them. And for that reason, they also have little choice but to accept the terms of their employer.
This is a bit like asking a starving man to cut off their finger in exchange for a life-saving meal, and then arguing that since the meal is obviously worth more to them than the finger, it must therefore be a reasonable trade.
Last edited:
Contextually, what if Microsoft has been a net negative compared to what there would have been without it? For instance, has Microsoft actually suppressed a lot of innovation? I'm aware this is also an question almost impossible to effectively measure. But it can be useful as an illustration that "success" of individuals and organisations isn't as straightforward as we think in terms of societal benefit.
Many early employees of Microsoft became incredibly rich, through shares they were offered in the company they worked for. Now, with the concept of "Microserfs", thousands toil for Microsoft without even being Microsoft employees. A shareholder who bought $10 million in Microsoft shares in 2010 now has ~$100 million in Microsoft shares. Did they really provide $90 million worth of value to Microsoft compared to coders who were key to making Microsoft products, earning a tiny fraction as much?
Thus it's very unclear to me people are truly paid (or otherwise profit) what they are worth. I don't see obvious reasons to say Gates "deserves" his vast Microsoft wealth. It could a tenth as much, and he'd still be stupendously rich and handsomely rewarded for his efforts. That he has that much is effectively arbitrary: created and maintained through legislation.
...and also when it is used to the detriment of others. When a billionaire lobbies politicians to give him a $10 million a year tax break, that's $10 million that the government no longer has to spend on social services lots of people use. When a company lobbies government to let them spew an extra 25% pollutant into the skies, that's a load of people with higher medical bills for asthma.
It's why journalists get paid when they produce nothing of any tangible value. Same with philosophers, or a big amount of white-collar work.
Not at all. Parasites can be involved in a positive sum game.
Behold!
A worker creates a product. The worker is paid a wage and the employer takes the product to be sold. A consumer buys the product from the employer for a lot more than the sum of the wage paid and the material cost and equipment depreciation involved in creating the product. The employer has collected an economic rent; the employer is a parasitic middleman; if the employer disappeared, the worker and the consumer could have made the trade themselves at some value more advantageous to both. And yet, since the worker created a product that has value to the consumer, the sum is positive.
I said and implied neither of these things. Gates stole his ideas (an implied reference to how he stole all his software ideas, which is an open secret) from others, but none of the rest of his actions would line up with the layman definition of theft so I did not use that word for his actions. When it comes to Microsoft and Bill’s many criminal acts, there’s plenty of settled or lost legal cases out there in support of my argument.
If this was the case, it would happen. But employers aren't just rent-seekers. They connect the worker making the product to the ability to market, distribute, account for, etc. The person can't just simply do their job alone and make the same deal only better, or else they would.
That's an intensely complicated counterfactual claim, borderline impossible to analyze. I'll allow that there are possible worlds that are better or worse that I can't say we've found an exceptionally good or bad outcome. But I will certainly say that those analyzing the situation without any regard to what is better or worse than the alternatives and instead saying that a company profiting means they're inherently stealing from their workers are fundamentally wrong before even attempting such an analysis.
You're confusing the marketer with the employer. And a CEO with an employer. As unfair as CEO compensation tends to be, at the very least they do perform a function.