Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Objectively, anyone making $50 million should feel it a lot and be taxed heavily. Nobody is making $50 million under their own power

You’ve got it backwards. The people making $50,000 are the ones who are dependent on someone else to provide all the infrastructure for their job.

View on HN

The person earning $50m a year is profiting on the labor of hundreds of thousands of people. Rent seeking on their labor and skills, relying 100,000x more on the infrastructure that made them rich. No one makes $50m a year in a vacuum, they do so by utilizing the economy they live in and rely on.

> Rent seeking on their labor and skills

Paying people for their work isn’t “rent seeking.” If I hire someone to replace my roof shingles, is that “rent seeking?”

You don’t clear $50m a year by paying people what they’re worth. The wages are unfair, by definition, if there is someone able to skim away that much at the top.

Your definition of “unfair” is quite peculiar. By your logic, the same salary for the same work can go from being “fair” to “unfair” depending on how many employees you have.

No, it's as simple as income ratios between the lowest and highest paid employee in a company. Above a threshold starts to be completely divorced from their respective work ethics and general intelligences. It's more just an abuse of systems that have been built up over time specifically to allow for that level of exploitation.

Quoting supply and demand in labour is just insulting and indicative of someone maybe getting a bit too high on their own supply.

> income ratios between the lowest and highest paid employee in a company

What is the mathematical or economic significance of this ratio?

If that's the way you see it, you are also free to do so. Labor is a market and the laws of supply and demand are at play just like any other market. Go start a company and hire some people. This is Y Combinator's Hacker News after all. The world needs more founders.

Imagine for a second if supply and demand were actually the only forces at play for these businesses run by billionaires… - forgetting oligopolies, blatant antitrust, lobbying, the revolving door between government and the c-suites, legal tax evasion, etc.

We don’t live in a fantasy world simulation on a frictionless plane where anyone can be a billionaire if they just pull up their bootstraps.

The comment you’re responding to claims that wage labor is exploitation on the part of the employer. That they can become exploiters themselves is usually not a convincing argument to them.

It’s also like telling someone with just eighty bucks to their name and debt up to their ears that they can try to win the lottery.

> The comment you’re responding to claims that wage labor is exploitation on the part of the employer.

That’s irrational.

And OP said “If that's the way you see it,” i.e. given the premise, “you are also free to do so.”

Ah yes, all the 50k makers are dependent on the very altruistic nature of the 50mil earners who all got there under their own power and without any systematic abuse, grifting, or generational wealth to get them going. Won't anyone think of these poor folks? They'll now have 49x0.099 mil less yearly income to charitably pay their indebted employees bonuses.

All parties involved are dependent on society facilitating approximately everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com