So let's say that you and I go into business together making artificial flowers. Initially we are both sewing them entirely by hand and selling them. We're barely making enough to scrape by, working twelve hours a day. It kind of sucks.

One day, I win a thousand bucks in the lottery and buy a couple of sewing machines for us to use. We can now make, oh, fifty flowers in the time it took us to make one.

Let's assume that the demand for artificial flowers is far higher than we can fulfill. We could work as many hours as we used to and start selling fifty times as many flowers. But instead we work a little less and sell thirty times as many. We're still we're making a lot more money than we used to.

Now. Since I bought the sewing machines with my own money, clearly I should be the one reaping all of the benefits of this new order. I'll take all the money and pay you exactly the same amount of money you were making when we were both sewing flowers by hand. So I'm getting about fifty-nine times as much as you are.

"Hey, Egypt," you say. "Thanks to those sewing machines, I'm creating a lot more value than I used to. Maybe I should be getting, I dunno, twice what I used to get? Or a hell of a lot more?"

And I sneer down at you from atop my golden toilet. "Your attitude reeks of entitlement," I say. "Get back to your sewing machine, Thenews."

Three weeks later, you're fired, and replaced by a guy living in a tent under the Interstate who'll make flowers for half of what you were paying. It's my sewing machines, after all.