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"If your social views include the view that life should be easy for everyone, ..."

That is a gross mis-characterization of the liberal worldview. The social contract in most modern capitalistic states is that we allow a winner-takes-all economic model as long as we ensure equal opportunity and social mobility. However, wealth and income inequality are at all time highs, and many people on the lower economic and social rungs are stuck in a poverty trap. This isn't about giving people a free lunch, it's about reforming the system to provide more opportunity to those in dire circumstances.

Regarding your craigslist exchange, you took advantage of someone's dire economic situation in order to improve your own. While not illegal, I would argue it is immoral, and this is happening on a much larger scale with Amazon. It is immoral to employ an individual for less than a living wage, regardless of what the market dictates should be the prevailing wage. It might not be Amazon's fault that poverty exists, and no one can blame them for exploiting it to their advantage, but they are benefiting enormously from our capitalistic economic system, and it is entirely reasonable to impose regulations and reforms on the winners in order to restore mobility and opportunity.

> It was a decent phone, worth probably $50 but I got it for $35 because the seller needed cash right away. Just because he was illiquid does not mean it was wrong of me to buy the phone from him. Or was that immoral of me and should I have been required to give him $50?

I was coercive of you: you used the fact that he essentially had no bargaining power to extract value in your favor. Whether or not you want to call that immoral is your business.

> I have never heard a story of Amazon threatening someone to work for them or using physical force to entice them to take a job

Amazon makes job offers which wouldn't be accepted without coercion, and uses the fact that benefits from social programs will be cut if the person uses the job to co-opt government coercion. They effectively threaten your current social program income to get you to accept a job you otherwise wouldn't.

Is that entirely Amazon's fault? No. Is Amazon using a messed up government policy to coerce people to take jobs they otherwise wouldn't? Yes.

> There is a reason top executives at Apple, Google and Amazon are paid well.

Because they're friends with the board of directors which sets their salaries, which are paid for not out of the directors' pockets but from shareholder profits?

Or maybe it's because the board wants the company to look like it's in the big leagues, and gee whiz, we're not in the big leagues unless we pay like we are, regardless of how the executives actually perform.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

Everyone's salaries come from shareholder's profits - including the factory worker's.

I don't think either reason holds - and if it does then those companies will fall to the wayside. If you think Google, Amazon and Apple are wasting millions of dollars of year overpaying for talented leaders then share your plan with the world to do better and take them out of business.

I think it's actually because within 10 years a company can be absolutely destroyed if they don't get the right leaders. Look at Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft. All were leaders in their fields ten years ago and now have competitors that are outpacing them (in the case of the two latter ones) or simply erasing them (in the case of Blackberry). If Blackberry discovers multitouch first and puts out an iPhone or if Microsoft makes tablets work in a consumer friendly way by hiring Jony Ive - then the whole landscape changes.

Also in large companies workers making $200k+ aren't usually buddies with the board but there is a highly competitive market for them which allows those salaries to be the norm. It's a skills economy and for people without skills a comfortable, not flashy, life is a good and available option.

Your market-based challenge "share your plan with the world to do better and take them out of business", which seems to be a fairly common retort to anyone who takes issue with the way any particular company is run, is not a valid argument, because it is predicated on the market operating correctly.

If the market does operate correctly, as you suggest, then someone could, indeed, start a company, and "take them (Google) out of business", unless of course their hypothesis about overpaying top earners was faulty, in which case they would be outcompeted. If, instead, the market does not operate correctly, then such an attempt might fail because of other unspecified market failures. There is no way of determining whether a challenger's failure to displace the market leader is caused by (in this case) their false belief that companies are overpaying their top earners, or whether the failure is caused by the market not operating correctly. Unless you can devise a way of distinguishing the two, then this type of argument is inherently uninformative.

On a slightly different note, I agree narrowly with your point that companies need talented leaders, though I am not as convinced that the leaders of the companies you list determined their fate as much as you appear (to me) to suggest. For example, Blackberry couldn't simply "switch" to producing iPhones, for a whole variety of reasons.

Are Google executives paid well? Last time I heard about it, they received $1/year salary, and tons of company stock. That ties their income directly with company performance (through stock price).

Larry & Sergey - $1

Eric Schmidt - $7,628,620

Patrick Pichette - $38,741,100

Nikesh Arora - $51,145,900

David Drummond - $31,301,900

http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyOfficers?symbol...

Bargaining power is limited both by competition for jobs, and by fundamental necessity, which was more my point. A group of workers who do not have the freedom to engage in competitive tender, because they are forced to address their fundamental needs, are in a much worse bargaining position irrespective of whether or not they have "skills to offer to society".

The wider point is that structure matters: an organisation that is run dictatorially by a small central group is, by my estimation, fundamentally more illiberal than an organisation that is run cooperatively by its members. I fail to understand why those people who are enamoured with free market principles are such staunch defenders of organisations that internally suppress those principles almost absolutely.

I am skeptical of the limited definition of coercion as only persuasion that takes place by force or threat; in my opinion there are many other, more 'polite' ways of influencing people that are just as pernicious. Indeed, I agree with both pyoung and DerpDerpDerp that your craigslist exchange was coercive in the sense that you exploited that person's situation to your own advantage. A basic test for whether or not an exchange is non-coercive is whether or not both parties would happily reverse the exchange. If not, then there was probably some element of coercion involved, even if it was simply an unaddressed asymmetry of information. Remember that perfect market information is one of the assumptions necessary for market Pareto optimality.