Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely.
Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.
I wish this was stated more often, at least to expose people to converse on ways we can allocate resources in different/arguably better ways compared to say 5k years ago.
You make sure there is no job safety so they are scared to ask for a raise. You make sure there is no good social safety net, so they fear for losing their job. You make sure the employees cannot effectively organize to present a more effective bargaining force.
And you get people to believe that a business model that can't pay its employees an equitable salary should still be allowed to continue.
Your question assumes that what we have now is natural, and that force is required to change things.
If the shop owner's thumb has been pushing down on the scales for years, then the solution is not that the customer needs to apply an opposite force to balance thing out, but the shop owner needs to stop applying force.
(Okay, applying a counter-force, as in Leslie Thrasher's "Tipping the Scales", would be a short-term solution, but it's also an easily corrupted one, and it makes most of the people feel like they are being ripped off.)
To start the answer to my question, first remove so-called "right-to-work" laws, or at least the legal requirement that non-members can "force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members." (Quoting Wikipedia Right-to-work_law#Unfairness .) There's plenty more, but it's a belabored topic that you can easily find elsewhere.
* Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity).
* Raise the minimum wage significantly.
>What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
"isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit"
Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end.
Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort.
Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down.
You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).
If that job wasn't worth that much to an employer, either the cost of the resulting service would rise or the job wouldn't get done, just like now.
Just curious, but that would deny many millionaires and billionaires the chance to change the world. For sure, SpaceX and Tesla probably would not exist [1].
I'm surprised that this sentiment is growing among many people that somehow they believe the Government is going to be better at experimenting and managing these types of far out projects rather than the free market.
SpaceX has probably the most advanced rockets in the world, far surpassing that of all other countries.
I am not sure I want the future of our species solely in the hands of politicians and not giving private enterprise a chance to rise up and have a shot.
If I misunderstood the gist of your post, I do apologise.
[1] I know they both have taken Government money, but both Tesla and SpaceX could not have been started by a Government politician or employee.
http://www.loper-os.org/wp-content/sovcosm.png
Although the manned moon landings were American, they probably wouldn't have happened if the Soviet Union hadn't beaten them into space. NASA were US Government funded. All manned launches since 2012 have been on Russian and Chinese rockets. No manned SpaceX launches yet. So it appears that communism has done more for manned space flight than private enterprise.
There are numerous other major government funded science and technology success stories: Manhattan Project, Concorde, CERN, ...
The same can be said of the Manhattan project with WWII. CERN is a valid counterargument, but I think it demonstrates that markets need to be occasionally corrected (to acomodate basic science research in this case), not that markets need to be dismantled.
Technologically complicated, Politically easy, "far out projects" or "moonshots", governments are relatively good. eg. putting the first man on the moon (politically easy: because of the competition with Russia).
Technologically easy, Politically complicated, "large scale projects", governments are (as the data shows) really, really bad at. eg. reforming the education system.
Some rationale: Humans looking for authority that then gain it, don't want to lose it. i.e. The dislike disruption. Government is run by humans with authority. It would then follow that governments don't like disruption.
Its extremely hard to politically justify disenfranchising all the poor performing teachers, administration, budget planners, healthcare workers, etc. even if it is actually in the best overall interest of society. Primarily because governments are a monopoly, and its in the best interest of all management (lower, middle or upper) in a monopoly to keep their controlling interests intact (and happy), regardless of productivity. As they say "keep things churning".
Are you sure? Finland government did pretty good in reforming education system..
> governments are a monopoly
No they are not! Bad governments, maybe. But ideally, they should be democratically controlled by the population, and then the usage of the term "monopoly" is meaningless. (Not to mention that each nation competes with other nations.)
These are the types of projects where a single billionaires great wealth can inspire other investors to come along. If Musk couldn't pour millions into his ventures, it's unlikely the average investor would have followed him into space.
In addition, the USA invested in the internet, space and atomic weapons solely for the purpose of war, even the hubble is based on military technologies. I am again concerned that people are arguing for a future that's dependent on the needs of politicians or the military.
Even China was smart enough to see value in the capitalism model. Allow for the ability of great wealth, allow the private citizen to decide how to deploy the fruits of their work and something good might come out it.
Also, the Government has taken over a billion dollars in tax from Mark Zuckerberg, so the Government has plenty to play with. Remember, it's always easier to play with other people's money, hence the inefficiency regarding the use of tax dollars.
I think I'd feel more comfortable with corporation(s) competing with the government, because then, you could "vote against them with your dollar." Another thing which is done in government labs in the US is having labs/universities compete with each other for funding (although whether this yields good incentives for research is another story, and we're trying to find avenues for innovation that are difficult for the government, and ostensibly, difficult for govt labs too).
Finally, if we do accept this form of oligarchy (where one oligarch is the government we vote for), no doubt will we have entities which disagree with each other, say, Soros or the Koch brothers. Now, then, the rest of us just become the grass at the feet of fighting elephants[0], and I hell don't know how anyone would feel comfortable with that. I suppose the only option you have then for having a voice is to become the next elephant, and while I love hacking/disruption as the next guy, I know statistics too, and I won't delude myself I will become Zuckerberg or even four orders of magnitude near him.
[0] http://www.afriprov.org/african-proverb-of-the-month/27-2001...
Not necessarily. People can still organize, collect wealth and build a large scale project themselves. Or the bureaucrats running companies can organize and together finance big projects. There are many other possibilities.
> allow the private citizen to decide how to deploy the fruits of their work
Assuming these really are their fruits, which is pretty disputable in case of very wealthy people.
> it's always easier to play with other people's money
I agree, and this is actually the reason why one person owning a billion may be more willing to invest to crazy projects than a thousand people owning million each.
It's wise to let those who are good at allocating resources be in charge of allocating resources. The best way to decide who is good at allocating resources is to create a system in which those who are good at allocating resources have opportunities to do so.
Why are you so sure?
Why that matters? Because humans need to eat at every point in time, and have limited timespan.
In fact most of the today's wealth was generated by people who are long dead. Despite this wealth being effectively "free", it is still a zero sum game how to distribute it.
The big problem is that being unslaved from obligatory wage is quickly being considered to be "rich".
This was a total non-sequitur. Mind explaining the logic there?
Billionaire tech founders are the worst examples to use for this argument. Zuckerberg's wealth is mostly paper wealth from his stock ownership. His net worth fluctuates greatly depending on Facebook's stock price.