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Comment by adamedw | Hacker News Reader

It could go to the people who produce the value in the first place: the workers.

I know, they could use the market to determine the rate at which that wealth transfer occurs. And then they could distribute it biweekly via direct deposit. They might even call it a salary!

Companies fight tooth and nail to keep the market from encroaching on their decisions about worker pay. Why do you think there's a taboo or outright ban on talking about compensation at many companies?

I wonder how many companies have "friendly" no-poaching agreements with each other like what Apple, Google, and co had[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

At what point should someone's creation be confiscated and given to employees?

What proportion of CEOs are also the founders of the company?

At what point is something with somebody's name on it that they never touch, but is completely created and maintained by others, considered not their creation anymore? I would think it would be death, but it's probably 70 years after death. Thousands of people, laboring day and night on the creation of a dead man who even when he was alive may have never quite known how it worked.

Gradually over the course of ~12-36 years, depending on the number of employees. If you started your business, say, Bamazon, 25 years ago or whatever, and its year 26, you're a trillion dollar corporation, etc, most of the new value add happening at Bamazon isn't down to the CEO's brilliance anymore, just because of the sheer scale of Bamazon. So by then most of that new value add should be going to the workers. Bezos would still have become a billionaire or whatever. And you can implement this pretty straight forwardly actually by just printing new shares for workers as part of their total comp.

This is nice in theory. What do you think happens in practice? People have two primary motivations for starting businesses. Money and independence. For the half that value independence, they will not hire people and all their businesses will remain lifestyle businesses.

I actually don't think it's nice in theory either btw. How does employee control benefit society at large? It only benefits employees. Employees will just pay themselves as much as they can for the least amount of work possible. It's the same reason price controls on housing are dumb. It just creates an entrenched class of individuals. If adding more employees to the business means the employee share of profit shrinks, they will just hire less.

It's not their creation, it's their idea. The employees are the ones who literally created it. Even if you assume all CEOs are founders, the thought that they deserve more than two orders of magnitude more compensation for leasing their idea is wild.

> It's not their creation, it's their idea.

Except in the cases where they literally create it? Every single idea and business started with a small group of people and often just a single person. Sometimes they create it, sometimes they pay someone else to create it.

If they pay someone to create it, do you think that person should take ownership in the company? Ok, maybe they should, but of course if they are taking part ownership they have to accept less cash right? Turns out most people don't want to deal with that risk and don't want to be paid in equity.

> If they pay someone to create it, do you think that person should take ownership in the company?

What do you think the people working every day are doing? They're literally creating the company. If they don't exist, the company stops existing, because companies are just people working. Effort in, revenue out. Divide up the profits by the amount of effort put into the business.

If the founder wants to profit from their idea, they should be more worried about the equity they already have and their personal impact on its value than their annual compensation going forward. Continually getting paid for an idea you already had and were already compensated for is wild.

If they can create everything why do they need employees?

To expand the scale so they can provide their creation to more people. If the employees can gain control most creators will simply choose to keep their creations small in scale so they can maintain their freedom. Often the only way people are convinced to part with this control is copious amounts of money.

Most of the things that a company produces are created by the employees.

Why don't the employees just go and produce it on their own? That way they can capture 100% of the value they produce.

That would work better than if the CEO and the business owner tried the same.

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