Hint: Even if you take only 1% of the work but employ 1000 people you are going to get rich.
Your benchmark for what is exploiting seems to not work particularly well in practice.
In many peoples opinion (including mine), yes. This can all be considered wage slavery.
Of course the magnitude and severity varies. A worker in the Gigafactory (probably) has a higher standard of living than the one in the Foxconn factory, who in turn probably has a better standard of living than the worker in the Nike sweatshop. But it’s all the same thing.
Also called a "job". You're telling me I'm a wage slave? (in the last 10 years nobody reported to me, I was never self-employed).
Through this sort of wage slavery in the last 10years, I have achieved an incredibly high standard of living, compared to the regular citizens of any age in human history. I think this narrative is just devaluing the meaning of words and the suffering of those who really are exploited.
And it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
Would it be great if more people could achieve prosperity - ideally, _all_ people? Yes it would. However, just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this (we can argue about details of taxation, and I don't think in particular USA has a good system, but that's more of "fine-grain detail" in the end)
> it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
I've lived in communism. It really is equal sharing of misery, _not_ equal sharing of reward. The reality is that Musk really puts in way more effort & takes a lot more risk than your average factory worker. But at the end of the day - not even that is what matters. What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia. Not sure what it would take to convince people it's an inherently bad idea - but I feel that at least by now the burden of proof should be on the shoulder of those who advocate it.
I'm not suggesting taking money from the rich. I'm suggesting not giving it to them in the first place.
> What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia.
I'm also not suggesting "equal sharing of resources". The idea that the only possible distributions of wealth are "everyone gets the same" and "unbounded in response to supply/demand" is silly. If all the billionaires in the world had $10million instead of $1 billion, and everyone with >$1million's wealth was scaled down in proportion, I'd be happy. There'd still be plenty to work for.
For me, the key issue with communism was too much concentrated power. That lead to inefficient resource distribution, because the people responsible for distributing had perverse incentives which lead to corruption, and even where the leadership was benevolent, they simply didn't have the mental resources to work out how best to distribute things.
Now, markets solve this problem, by allowing everyone to have input into what the economy produces, simply by spending their own share of our economic output. However, this mechanism relies on economic demand being somewhat evenly spread out amongst the population. Otherwise you end up with the same problem: those in control of demand have incentives to pursue their own self-interest, and even where they are benevolent, they don't have the means to determine efficient distribution.
Bill Gate's philanthropy is a good example of this: very well meaning, but hopelessly ineffective given the huge sums of money involved. Notably, this wealth is being distributed just like wealth in communist countries: in a planned way, by a central authority. Extreme wealth concentration circumvents the market mechanism, and should be avoided for just the same reasons as communism.
(honest question, it feels like you have an answer; I just don't see it)
What is money, other than the power to get others to perform economic activity for you, backed by the state? It is given by it's very nature.
(as a side note, I disagree both that Bill Gates' philanthropy is "hopelessly ineffective" or that the rich drive demand - but these are two long discussions/debates in and of themselves)
"If everything is important, nothing is."