2. Your company produces something hugely useful / beneficial for society; in other words, it produces something hugely valuable.
3. Your company is therefore valuable, making you super wealthy.
Which part of the above is unethical?
1) Are there externalized costs?
2) How much the value is actually created by owners vs other labor within the company?
3) Are all participants rewarded proportionally to the value they create, or is there a labor-value arbitrage going on?
One simplifying/ideological model attributes the company's existence essentially to the owners and posits therefore obviously they deserve all the value and/or that every employee is participating purely voluntarily and so whatever they agree to must necessarily be fair. Another only recognizes the labor theory of value and would find anything other than a coop immoral.
2. Your company extracts value from everywhere it can, to the detriment of it's counterparties: employees, the environment, customers, partners, contractors
For one example: Amazon warehouse employees (contractors?) are not paid very well for very hard work. I'm sure someone has a comeback for this, but it is an example of value extraction.
Another: Amazon does not do a great job of policing counterfeits, to the detriment of customers.
Another: Sellers on Amazon have a variety of complaints, you can look them up.
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If the business existed for the purpose of being ethical, these conditions would not exist. The business exists for the purpose of extracting value.
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Edit: Put another way - If your company ONLY produces something highly valuable, then someone can simply create a competing product and undercut you.
An example of this is looking at drug prices when patents expire. Generic drugs can be sold for MUCH cheaper than the patent protected "name brand" drug. The product is highly valuable, but may not be high cost, unless it is protected in some way.
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Edit edit: If you want to defend these companies or capitalism in general, that's fine with me.
I would like to gently point out that sometimes we dance on very fine lines of morality in the course of doing business.
Their business model was to be the cheapest. Cheapest employees, cheapest parts. They filled the market share for people looking for cheap cheap parts. That involves crappy service.
If they raised their employee pay, the entire business model goes belly up. That means, no more cheap cheap parts for customers and no entry job positions for employees looking to break the field.
It was a delicate balance of ""exploitation"" and keeping them happy enough they are willing to stay.
If you have nothing to offer the company besides a pulse, you don't get to pick and choose. Why would that be fair to force a company to pay more for no reason? Sometimes you put up with bullshit for a couple years and then you get to be more picky.
I realize the obvious counter "That's not real rational skepticism".
Here's a short list of things that super rich people do:
- screwing someone over
- treating people like robots
- lying/deception
- taking advantage of people in poorer countries
- taking advantage of tax loopholes
- bending the law
- buying off politicians
- bullying people
- etc.
3a. Your company is therefore valuable. 3b. Your company being valuable makes you super wealthy.
3b is unethical.
It seems to be that statement needs to be justified with a little bit more than "because I say so".
Whatever the line is, 1 billion is clearly on the other side of it. I'm not interested in sorites paradox-ing the question beyond that.
Also there's probably lots of billionaires here in Indonesia, where 1B IDR is only $67k USD. Do you object to Indonesian billionaires as well? Or does it only matter if you're a billionaire in USD? What if I'm a billionaire in GBP?
Do you really believe that everyone on earth should only be allowed to have exactly what is needed to "have a comfortable life" (which definition of comfortable we're following seems like another quandary that we'll ignore for the moment) and nothing more?
Yes, in general I think people shouldn't have more wealth than is needed to live a comfortable life, for some reasonable definition of comfortable. I'm not a communist -- I don't want everyone to have exactly the same level of wealth or anything like that. I think it's great that people are rewarded for pro-social activities (though capitalism has a very narrow definition of pro-social).
As I said before, I'm uninterested in sorites paradoxes.
It is a moral issue when someone has great excess that could be redistributed to people who are not yet at the "comfortable life" standard (whatever has been agreed upon). However, if everyone is already at the comfortable life standard, what could possibly be your justification for saying that one guy having more than another is still immoral?
Earlier you said "I don't want everyone to have exactly the same level of wealth or anything like that", but honestly it sounds like you do. If your moral basis isn't "we need to fix poverty" but rather "delta bad", then your ideal must be for everyone to have the same, anything else is internally inconsistent.
And I will point out that despite the other half of your protestation ("I'm not a communist"), this is an unfortunate trait you share with most communist regimes of history – more interested in the "eat the rich" part than the "feed the poor" part.