That's literally insane for Korean living standards. Those people can basically retire
There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.
So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
On one side they tell you "You'll get Weekends off! You'll get more money! You'll work fewer hours!" and other side says "You can't talk directly to your boss! Corruption could happen in your union if you do nothing to stop it! Lazy people might keep their job unless HR documents the problems!" and somehow people are like "Man, I'd much rather spend less time on my family and hobbies than not be able to go directly to my boss!"
Same with regulations. One side says "Have clean air and water! Don't get screwed over by companies who poison you!" and the other side says "Billion dollar companies would have to pay more to not poison you! Look at all these terrible regulations we already bribed lawmakers into passing! Regulations BAD!" and people just eat it up.
It makes me wonder how much more extreme they could take things before people stopped falling for it.
These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.
“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.
Take another example, someone who won a lottery vs someone who hasn't, but otherwise lived the same life, in your world view one deserves it and the other doesn't. And their their offspring forever on as well? If you accept this now your list of exceptions is using force, connections and also luck. But we can keep adding examples and exceptions to the rule until at some point you need to admit that way of looking at the world is too flawed, no? BTW this luck aspect is the same as the "Texan got a knock on the door offering them millions forever because they have oil under their house" so I guess I did end up re-arguing that.
You're ascribing a level of agreement with your opinions about who deserves what level of credit people deserve for results that are far beyond the scope of a single person to vast swaths of people who have no power to contest the system that has existed for so long that no one alive created. The reason I "pay my dues" to the grandchildren of random rich people from 100 years ago is not because I owe them but because there's literally nothing I can do to avoid it regardless of how plausible I find the extreme opinion you're confidently asserting is some sort of self-evident fact.
Also, it's not sharing with society that makes people billionaires, it's taking from society. Had all that profit gone to society, they wouldn't be billionaires. Now often (not always) they provide some value to society but that generates that profit, but quite often even that was based on taking from society. They take natural resources to exploit, monopolise a market, exploit workers, etc.
Since 2/3rds of American billionaires are from industry, if it is true that their parents were multi-millionaires, that is wonderful. The fact that children here can take the platforms their parents build them and turn that into great value for the American people is a good thing and one of the reasons I am drawn to this country.
Brings to mind a certain creature that thrives in festering wounds.. It's in the tip of my...
I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.
I don't have any problem with people getting insanely rich from stock price increases, but the argument that it's society sharing the value they created ignores the fact that they were only responsible for the initial foundations of that value, and not all the work that continues later.
That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.
And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.
She gets more utility than she pays for (that's the one trick of capitalism).
Is that trickle down?
Maybe look for a better word that encompasses other political systems too - power?
There are many examples of surveillance states (and the best known examples were not labeled capitalist).
The surveillance you blame on Musk is the same from other ISPs - therefore your analysis is simply incorrect. She needs a VPN to avoid ISP snooping on the metadata (IP addresses used, DNS, etc).
And the US is a bigger snoop (Echelon, 5 eyes, Room 641A).
Our individual choices are limited in New Zealand (written on an iPhone - far more snoopy than my ISP).
Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.
That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.
I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.
That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit.
One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion dollars.
The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.
Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.
This is not true, and somewhat confusing, because "takes the risk" means two distinct things - making decisions and living with the consequences of them. Economic production is a collective effort. The management of the company is who usually makes the decisions; these might coincide with owner (especially in small business) but often they're just another employee.
On the other hand, bad decisions made by management affect everyone in the company, not just the owner. The rich enough owner rarely lose their livelihood (we have limited liabilities btw), but the employees might lose the only source of income.
And the system where you have only one person (owner as main manager) making decisions ("take risks") that can negatively impact many people (his employees, customers and what not) is structurally risky, it actually increases the risk of something going wrong (aside from it being a moral hazard). (POTUS is an extreme example of this.) The risk is shared (collectively owned, if you will) and so should be the decision-making.
Is this a possible failure mode of the system?
What sort of symptoms might one look for in a society if we believed this might be happening?
Or do we simply dismiss that this has been proven impossible (as per the theory of Money 101) and move on?
Right, and CEOs famously are the first ones laid off when the company is flailing and losing money, because after all, they're the ones at the helm of the ship! And of course when a CEO does leave, they never get a golden parachute.
> Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.
Sure, but plenty of people think that the way value is distributed today is completely out of proportion to their contributions, and you're presenting it like the current way is the only possible rational way rather than an emergent property of the entirety of human history being an uneven playing field.
I can think of a few. You've got things like Shapley values. But it's not a "neutral" way to attribute outcomes to actors.
It's funny actually, I read about Shapley scores ages ago, and then the go-to example was basically political corruption: assume a bunch of political parties with varying vote weight but no principles whatsoever, aiming to secure a majority to split a "prize" among themselves. But looking at Wikipedia now, it's practically presented as a method to guarantee fairness.
Either way, there's no neutral measure of value (or for that matter, effort) either. What a dollar gets you depends 100% on who else has dollars and how much, so productivity or efficiency can never be separated from distributional concerns.
I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.
Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.
Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.
There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)
Believe it or not co-ops exist just fine and some do very well. It sounds like what you would like is a co-op and I will be quite happy for you if you start one.
This is where startup seed funding comes from, capitalists like YC who are good at it rather than some incompetent. It's why bad companies eventually lose the ability to raise, freeing up societal resources.
What appears to be implicit in your comment ("There is no need for a capitalist") is an advocacy for central planning for capital. Although you also say "they can pay taxes" so maybe that's not what you're advocating for.
If you want to know what I think is best, it's possibly a wealth tax applied on global wealth, along with stronger regulations around media concentration, political spending, and a few other things. But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.
No, it isn't. You can have democratic control over capital, respecting subsidiarity principle. It's no more centralized or decentralized than under capitalism.
> But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.
If you have a high concentration of wealth you have the same centralized control, regardless whether the mechanism is capital markets or gosplan.
What about the control that out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats have over large amounts of taxpayers' money? Shouldn't we find that far more problematic overall?
> There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially.
Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment? Sounds like there is a need after all, otherwise you could just have a partnership structure and take no outside money whatsoever.
These things are connected and both are problematic. See e.g. Citizens United vs FEC.
> Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment?
I agree there is a need to raise capital, because any large scale economic activity is a collective enterprise. Whether this collective enterprise should be owned by a single person, or small subgroup, or by all participants, is an orthogonal question.
I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.
There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".
The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.
No billionaire is forced to break up a public company to pay taxes, the same as no average Joe is forced to sell his clothes to pay taxes. The idea in common is that if one knows that one must have cash at the end of the fiscal year, then one sets aside the money and simply avoids buying clothes or investing in assets.
A 40 year old person can’t retire on that money.
I don’t think they will be allowed to retire.
I’m just a dumb blue collar worker, but I’m going to go with “No” here.
They were only ever owed what they agreed to work for.
Now, that’s changed and they negotiated a different agreement.
They were never owed this until both parties agreed they were.