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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

>by taking advantage of many, many others, from the workers that they pay as little as possible (e.g. Uber) to their customers whom they charge as much as possible (e.g. the Pharma corps).

This is not a useful definition of “taking advantage of”. I don’t see anyone clamoring to pay anything more than the lowest prices at Walmart or Target or Amazon, nor are they offering to accept less than the most their employer or customer offers them.

If there is a power imbalance between buyer and seller, that is the responsibility of the government to remedy. In your examples, options would be UBI for people who “need” to drive for Uber, and taxpayer funded research to develop medicine so that they aren’t patented by a private for profit entity.

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The price of a product is not the same as the wages a corporation pays its employees. Walmart's billions of profits could have been shared more fairly with its employees but that's not how the "Cult of the MBA" treats their fellow human beings.

And it is not the government's responsibility to make us treat our fellow human beings with generosity and compassion, though I would welcome any attempts for them to do so. Unfortunately, the governments of the world are nearly wholly controlled by the callous wealthy.

> Walmart's billions of profits could have been shared more fairly with its employees but that's not how the "Cult of the MBA" treats their fellow human beings.

Except, to a large extent, Wallmart hiring executives is kind of like you or me buying groceries. They'd love to pay them less, but they can only choose from what's offered.

It's supply and demand and information asymmetry all the way down. It's not a feature of capitalism per se; it's something arising naturally out of desires and scarcity. Economic philosophies differ by the ways they approach this phenomenon.

But you are missing the very ethos of their hiring and wage practices: greed above humanity. It is what I call the "Cult of the MBA" and it drives our current world economic system is is destroying the Earth and effectively enslaving the vast majority of its population. And they own our governments.

Price of a product and wages a corporation pays (prices of the labor product of an employee) are exactly the same.

Generosity and compassion won’t prevent your customers going to the vendor across the street who will supply what you do for cheaper.

And Walmart’s profits would have provided $3k extra dollars to each employee (not life changing), and with 2.6M employees, that indicates a profit margin so low that they are selling everything they have as cheap as possible. How’s that for compassion and generosity for its customers? Should they give products away for free or pay people to take products from them?

Should they double their employees’ wages and thus raise prices so that their customers go to Target or Amazon and then lose out on revenue, and then how will they pay their doubled wages?

You can’t fight the benefits of technology and efficiencies of scale with people’s charity. You have to make laws that lead to everyone having a better quality of life. Everyone working a maximum # of hours per day/week, everyone having access to education, etc.

Competition is for animals; cooperation is solely human.

That our capitalistic system is competitive has good points (like keeping prices low, keeping markets efficient), but without compassion, generosity and fairness it becomes a tool of the wealthy to oppress the poor. The evidence is abundant.

Yes, the government MUST absolutely take an active role in legislating fairness for the powerless, but it really comes down to the individuals to manifest such fairness, and fairness only comes from compassion. And generosity in a business setting must meet the economic standard of recouping the costs of business, but when the business is set about solely maximizing profit for its owners, it has taken its darkest path forward. What that has led to in 2019 are laws crafted by the industries that seek to exploit the Earth and its wage slaves.

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