rad88

I didn't say it's easy, or that there shouldn't be compensation! All those people add value and some of their work is very difficult. But difficulty of work is not the basis upon which they have large ownership stakes. Many jobs are not nearly as easy as they seem, but most merely pay a wage or fixed salary.

The founder controls the legal business entity and contributes capital assets and real or intellectual property. The financier purchases ownership directly. This is why they "deserve" to appropriate the value created by the company in perpetuity.

The founder may have done a lot of hard work in creating that intellectual property (including brand) in the first place, but it is the legal ownership of it that he trades for ownership in the company, not his hard work. In other instances it's possible to simply purchase IP or brand outright in the formation of a business. The commonality in these cases is legal ownership and the trade of capital assets, not hard work, whether their job is one I could not do personally, etc.

Yep, a great division of labor created that wealth for the company, and the developer is not entitled to 15% of it's revenue (or even profit) just for that work. This isn't a practical issue though. The everyday situation is not that a undeserving worker is granted a large ownership stake, it's that an undeserving financier/executive/founder is.

According to this logic, our developer has actually earned his wages in perpetuity from this single year of work (or at least so long as that 15% value added lasts). But that's clearly not how it works either.

The issue in this example is ownership. Executives add value and they are granted large ownership stakes in the business. Workers are not. You use the example of the executive who figures out how to grow the business to prove that he is entitled to appropriate some of the other employees' added value -- since otherwise that value wouldn't exist in the first place. But our developer can't take his yearly salary out of the 15% increased revenue he enabled back in 2012, on top of compensation for whatever value he creates this year.

In any event, the example is very contrived. $10M in sales is as arbitrary as 20% profit margins. Margins could be any amount less or a great deal more. Revenues could be sky high or non-existent. You might expect to find a developer making $100k regardless.

I have rarely ever heard someone argue that. lettergram did not argue that, only that employee wages are exploitative. In a labor market with unemployment and no real safety net it's clear that workers cannot individually leverage a fair wage.

You're making fun of the sensitivities and stress experienced by some people after they are raped. Nice one.

It's clearly about his son, though I don't assume he says it straight to his face. I thought you were also thinking of your offspring. Sorry I've misunderstood.

Please don't. If you have difficulties with your children, using this term can only make them worse.

Such a trip costs money. To secure the legal right to inhabit the island, to make the trip, and to bring enough supplies to survive.

A person either needs to use his parent's cash or to work for a number of years and save before leaving. The "choice" isn't available to him until that happens, so either his parents must work to purchase their child's freedom, or he must work to purchase it himself. In either case this is one of the very definitions of slavery.

> Having a job is the cost of living in society.

In other words, we are born into debt and must work all our lives to pay off that debt. This is true in so many ways, and makes what we're talking about amount to at best a kind of bonded child labor.

You don't have to think of it as slavery, but it's very very far from COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. There is no deserted island to live on!! There are no guarantees of universal housing, or healthcare, or much else that is needed to survive. Until there are, working vs. not working can never be a real choice. The working class by definition must work in order to live.

10 hours a week would be fantastic. Or any non-zero amount of time. If everyone did this it would be a revolutionary force the likes of which have not been seen in decades.