Are you suggesting that workers do not have employment contracts where they agreed to trade labour for wages at a fixed price?
Workers always have the choice to take the risk of starting their own company for higher potential earnings.
To begin, you know nothing of the circumstances of millions of people. Certainly not enough to make sweeping statements.
In 2023, there were 5.5 MILLION new businesses started in the USA. Do those people all have generational wealth? of course not.
The reality is it’s easy to start a business but very hard to succeed.
It is simple - so simple that 5.5 millions of Americans can use their family money to do it. That doesn't preclude there being 360M Americans that don't start a business, because they don't have family money.
Sweeping statements on both sides I think.
I completely agree on risk though and it highlights the core of the argument - building a business is time consuming and risky in a way that being an employee is not.
That’s one reason why business owners are able to capture more profit. They took more risk and placed themselves into a situation where their earnings are not bounded by a single contract.
Everybody has free will and could start a business but not everybody is capable due to skill, capacity, circumstance, etc.
Therein lies the irony. None of the people whining loudest will start a company because it’s risky and fraught with danger but they want all the spoils of ownership and responsibility.
My point isn't really that people from well-off families are more likely to start a family, although that probably is true as well. My point is that people coming from a regular background are more likely to start less riskier businesses, less chance of failure but also less chance of reaching a billion dollars.
Just a few decades ago, that CEO would have paid his fellow countryman a modest salary and would have also made less themselves.
When you just imagine the staggering gap we've created, it feels deeply unfair. And it's not just a matter of starting a business. It is a structural moral failing.
Instead, useful idiots everywhere are proposing to add restrictions to the parts of the system working well.
You're right. So I guess we are agreeing that the hyper-capitalist system we currently have relies on exploiting others?
We can build a system with less sharp edges without blowing it up.
Like worker representation on boards (Germany does this), cap gains that reduces as you hold investments (Clayton Christensen proposal), and holding the countries we outsource to similar environmental and labor standards.
Wealth accruing to owners rather than the workers who produce it is older than employment contracts. I'm pointing out that this arrangement is the result of a set of choices that have been made, and we could choose otherwise. The fact that we consider this one approach correct and fair and not others is not inevitable.
Profit is not surplus value created by worker - that’s a 4 year olds understanding and negates all the other components of the system of which labour is only one.
We have tried “choosing” various “arrangements” (or more correctly, competing economic systems) and evidence points to capitalism being the correct approach to maximise liberty, growth and progress.
B) These workers are free to work on their own - why don't they form their own company or become self employed?