Hacker News Reader

Comment by daedalus6174 | Hacker News Reader

One mistake pg makes here is assuming that to be an exploitative billionaire you have to be good at exploiting people or have personal manipulative qualities.

You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.

View on HN

Hypothetical question:

I have little money but I write an amazing book and it sells to millions. Each books takes, say, $5 to print, and yet I sell it for $15. Therefore I end up wealthy from this endeavor.

Did I exploit the people who chose to buy my book? The people who printed it?

Did you personally sell millions of books on your own? Probably you used some service like amazon in order to sell those books and fulfil the orders, in this hypothetical, in which case the lefty argument would be that you are indirectly profiting from the exploitation of both amazon's workers and the employees of the printing company.

That is the labor theory of value, those more rightward of that position would say that the buyer and seller come to a mutual agreement.

"Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation."

Who are these large number of people? Customers or suppliers? In socialism, customers are usually held captive because of limited suppliers. In capitalism, suppliers are usually held captive because of fierce competition to get customers. Neither sounds inherent exploitation by the entrepreneur.

I believe that the claim is that the workers are exploited, because they produced value but received less than the value they produced. And that does sound like exploitation. But consider the alternative.

Let's say that every worker was paid for the full value that they produced. That would mean that the profit of every company was $0, because the workers got all the value produced. How many companies would we have? Probably not very many. Risk my capital to start a business, for a return of $0? Yeah, no. I'll pass. So will most people.

And that would mean that we wouldn't have the things that large businesses produce, from computers to airplanes to vaccines.

Even for the workers, is that a net win? I don't think so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com