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Comment by martin-t | Hacker News Reader

Funny that you say that because at some point I started dividing people in my head into what I call builders and redistributors:

- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.

- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing

I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.

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> by providing a non-essential service like salesmen...

Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.

You didn't understand what I wrote.

Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.

The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.

In civilizations, people used to primarily be farmers but as food production increased, this gave rise to the specialization or division of labor. In the nature of an evolutionary competition of companies, those that specialize into builders and sellers will do better than builders that try to do both, therefore the former paradigm will win out.

I am not against specialization.

I am against some specializations getting paid per unit of work regardless of the market value of their product while other specializations get paid a cut of the market value.

I am against positions of power which allow people who don't produce anything to decide how much other people who do actually produce something get paid.

Etc.

I am fundamentally against inequality.

> but as a builder you can do it yourself

One who can both build and sell is indeed a rare specimen (unicorn?). I know many builders and less than 10% of them can sell.

> Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.

You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.

Can you name it?

> this division is at the core of inequality

Of course it is. You are limited to 168 hours in a week that you can do work.

But there is no limit to the hours that other people can work for you.

Now the question is how to get the message out and change how it works.

Because this can't be that hard to understand even for the average person.

Do you think this is some revolutionary insight you've stumbled upon? Most people already know this, and yet the system is still the way it is.

A lot of people don't care.

A lot of people who care are unable to do anything about it because representative democracy is too indirect.

And yes, I think a lot of people don't fundamentally understand this, otherwise things like co-ops would be more common.

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