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As a general statement of fact, American companies do not pay their workers enough. We know this because aggregate corporate profits are their highest share of GDP ever, and wages from labor are at or near the lowest. There are whole sectors of business that exist by paying poverty level wages to their employees.

This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place.

As for "decisions throughout life," you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America.

>This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place.

Are you suggesting instituting wage price controls? Are you suggesting physicians, nationwide, are paying below market rates? Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair?

What sectors of business pay below poverty rates?

Has the standard of living been adjusted upwards over the last 20-30 years, with the development of technology, and widely available affordable energy?

>you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America.

Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty. What better example of a bad decision than to have sexual intercourse out of wedlock resulting in pregnancy? It was voluntary, yet it was a decision that can change the rest of her life for the worse. Is single mother pregnancy caused by people with bad morals?

> Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair?

Circular logic / begging the question. The crux of the debate is whether the free-market is a good arbiter of fairness.

> Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty.

Poverty is the best predictor of teen/single mother pregnancy.

Circumstances of birth are the best predictor of poverty.

The free market is better at figuring out fairness than a central government. Supply and demand, by its nature, determines what is fair to be paid. If it wasn't fair, people wouldn't work the job. If it was more than fair, then more people would enter the job pool, which will cause an equilibrium market rate to be obtained.

Unfortunately, the central government gets itself into market regulation constantly and distorts the free market.

Poverty doesn't force people into single motherhood.

"If it wasn't fair, people wouldn't work the job."

This is demonstrably not true. People will work jobs that pay less than their cost of living hoping somehow to get by. Your argument seems to assume sufficient demand for an individual's skill/labor such that they have power in the marketplace to do as they please.

It’s inherently unfair from the beginning.

If you’re poor you go to a public school. Even if you are get a perfect GPA, it probably isn’t good enough to get into good universities. Anecdotally. my high school had several students that were AP scholars, national merit scholars, great SATs, etc... and all of them went to Ohio State after getting rejected from better schools. I don’t think anyone that went to my high school had been accepted to a prestigious university in several years.

Your teachers are also trying to teach 30 other kids so that will hurt compared to better public schools/private schools. Hell, you might even have to skip doing extra curricular activity’s entirely in favor of work, which will hurt your chances of going to a good college. Additionally, your parents don’t have “legacy” status at good universities which will probably hurt you. If you’re poor your family probably doesn’t have connections that will hurt you after your formal education has ended. If your family is poor then taking business risks are also less likely to happen and more financially risky.

The list can go on and on. I don’t know how to fix that and it wont be solved solely by wealth redistribution.

I don't disagree with you, but I'd encourage you to try to be a little more empathetic in thinking about how "individuals make decisions...that determine the courses of their futures."

Sometimes their decision set is unfavorable. Other times things happen that are beyond their control. Yet more people just make bad decisions.

People are the product of their environments.

Ben Carson, despite growing up in the slums to a single mother, became a world renowned neurosurgeon.

Statistically, Ben Carson's success is a rarity, but there were factors in his success that were not related to his upbringing, otherwise he would have failed as others in his position would have failed.

Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack?

Should Ben Carson be more deserved of his income because he came from worse background compared to his neurosurgeon colleagues?

I spent 15 years of my life studying my craft (medicine), while my contemporaries drank alcohol, smoked marijuana, traveled extensively, spent rather than saved, and otherwise wasted their gifts. Should they be rewarded and me punished?

And we can cut right to the meat of it: punishment versus reward, because this is exactly the direction that modern politics takes these studies and attitudes. It was part of Obama's class warfare tactics when pushing for tax increases on individuals making over $400k. I don't know how much you earn, but if you're in the 1% like me, you would feel the constant antipathy simply because you have a certain income (but a fraction of the wealth because of delayed gratification, student loans, opportunity costs, etc).

>contemporaries drank alcohol, smoked marijuana, traveled extensively, spent rather than saved, and otherwise wasted their gifts

The point most people are bringing up in this thread is that the children of the upperclass do that all the time and still inherit enough wealth and property to earn more than you.

>The point most people are bringing up in this thread is that the children of the upperclass do that all the time and still inherit enough wealth and property to earn more than you.

The point is that the top 1% defined by the article is based on wages, not wealth. Why isn't the discussion focused on taking wealth away from the super wealthy and redistributing it?

For instance, if you have a net worth of $50 million, then 10% has to be liquidated and given to the government. Would this be fair?

Not just given "to the government", but spent on public works, social safet nets, and other forms of productive redistribution.

And yes, I think 10% off of $50 million is plenty fair. Yes, you earned that money, and I bet you would use it productively instead of blowing it on a yacht. But there are homeless people freezing to death on the streets of New York today. Don't you think you can spare a little?

Fundamentally, like I said, I agree that the top 1% by wealth is different than the top 1% by income. Perhaps we should tax income using tax brackets that scale with net worth.

> Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack?

Rather than thinking of earning slightly less as "punishment," you should consider it as the price paid for civilization and the foundations upon which your very ability to earn a high wage are built.

>Rather than thinking of earning slightly less

What is your frame of reference for "slightly less"? Physician salaries are already substantially less than what they were 20-30 years ago in real dollars.

"I think computer scientists are paid too much, so they should be paid less. I think they're worth only 75% of what they get paid currently."

"I think kindergarten teachers are paid too much, so they should be paid less. I think they're worth only 75% of what they get paid currently."

"I think basketball players are paid too much, so they should be paid less. I think they're worth only 75% of what they get paid currently."

Most workers' wages are substantially less than they were 20-30 years ago.

So, should everyone's pay be cut proportionally to compensate the people who do not work? Should teachers be paid 25% less?

It's not about people who do not work. It's about people who do work, sometimes two jobs, and still don't have, say, any kind of medical safety net.

> is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends?

To the extent that their differing roles are circumstances of birth and life, and that fairness is part of your morality, yes, it is.

> Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business intuition to start their own business?

Those are all circumstances of birth, be it nature or nurture.

We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?

>We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?

Does being a physician require a higher level of emotional intelligence, memory, reasoning, spatial intelligence, determination, stamina, moral conscientiousness, compassion, and a lower amount of mental illness, physical illness?

Not everyone can become a physician. Those who lack in any particular dimension have to compensate in other ways to succeed in medicine. It's why medical school admission is so competitive and multifactorial, to weed out those who can't make it, and shouldn't make it in the case of lack of compassion.

What do physicians deserve for an income? What do basketball and football players deserve? What do CEOs deserve? It's all from the same mindset: someone else has something I do not have.

One the reasons "not everyone can become a physician" is because physicians have one of the strongest protectionist unions in America, limiting access to the field and driving customers to fake doctors (chiropractic, naturopath, homeopath), hurting health outcomes.

Do you have some research/information you can share about this? It's a fascinating concept to me.

Supply and demand is a strange notion?

And yes, the secretary would suddenly have a valuable set of skills that would command more in terms of "wealth".

Generous social safety nets are a compromise between "everyone gets the same because all inequality is wrong" and "If you're not doing something important you should die in poverty".