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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

It's a textbook example of how owners of capital can extract economic rent from wage workers they hire to utilize that capital to produce something valuable. The whole point of any for-profit business that is not worker-owned is to "do investors a favor" with the money obtained by paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce.

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No. Employees are neither VCs, nor credit institutions, nor social benefactors, nor non-profit, nor pro-bono volunteers. They work for a wage – And, yes, first hired that joined the ranks of executives with a vetted interest in the company (e.g. stock options) are already something other. Paying the wage is an obligation, if the employers want the work to be provided. Risks – and the associated rewards - are primarily with the investors. A work culture that shifts the risks onto workers has to be rethought.

> paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce

Have you ever owned a business? If employees got paid the value they produce, why would any business bother to exist?

If you want to get paid the value you produce: start a co-op; join a co-op; start contracting; or become a founder. Stop whinging, and do something about it. So many employees choose to work for a business - it is a transaction where they get paid and the business makes money, and both are usually better off for it.

I too dislike seeing employees get taken advantage of, but “fixing” capitalism is not trivial.

IOW employees take on less risk and in general are compensated accordingly.

You can get paid in equity… and be 20-80% down on TC this year depending on where you work.

Note that I didn't make any moral judgment on the matter, or any specific suggestions on how to fix it. I merely pointed out what the arrangement is explicitly - yet all the replies are, essentially, saying "this is fine" (or, at least, "this is the best that we can do"). Fair enough, but let's at least be explicit about what's on the table, and let's not pretend that the resulting distribution of produced wealth is not a consequence of a pre-existing and self-perpetrating economic power imbalance.

Co-op employees seem to be doing better off on average, so I would argue that "usually better off for it" is not really true. Better off than trying to run their own business - yeah, probably true for most; regardless of who gets the profits, businesses still need professional managers to run them effectively.

I answered why I think your original statement is nonsensical, yet this new reply goes off on other tangents. Plus you appear somewhat hypocritical to me: you are complaining about the fruits of capitalism, but yet you chose to move from the USSR to the USA and work at Microsoft!! You also appear to write a lot on politics, which is definitely something Hacker News discourages on the site (and here I am engaging with you, sorry). Edit: I am just saying that idealistic political clichés are usually meaningless. Capitalist businesses and the consequences are a compromise, and I agree it would be nice if we could make better compromises, and it is worthwhile trying to. My personal definition of engineering is: compromises with reality.

I moved from Russia to the US; capitalism is certainly better in the latter than the former. Besides that, there's also the question of social and political freedoms, which is largely orthogonal to economic systems; you can and we do have brutal capitalist dictatorships, and there are democratic socialist polities (e.g. Rojava). I'm also no fan of USSR and authoritarian socialism in general, but the choices aren't limited to that vs capitalism.

In any case, to reiterate, the point is that for it to be a compromise, we should all be aware of the nature of that compromise - that is, who is giving up what exactly, and for whose sake. It is only a true compromise if people knowingly choose to preserve it, because they feel that it's the best deal that they can get.

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