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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.

It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.

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Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.

Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.

That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.

And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.

I don't think it's just slightly worse off

It is. That is the whole thing where American setup is supposed to be better then European - you can fail, fail again and then again with little punishnent or consequence. And it is not like European consequences were grave, you are just less likely yo get another investment once you failed.

Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.

When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.

The "most businesses" small and medium businesses are by large not the Monopoly men owning significant capital.

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