Thank you for taking the education angle. I’d like to add another perspective for folks’ benefit. I’m not 100% sure it’s correct, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
Your labor has some value. Ideally, you should be paid a corresponding amount of wealth to the amount of value you generate through your labor. So you do $20 worth of work and get $20 worth of money. This is the ideal.
But how much labor is worth $20? Capitalism takes advantage of this ambiguity. The capitalist, e.g. a business owner or investor or similarly positioned person, pays you $19 for that $20 labor and pockets the remaining amount as profit. Sure, the capitalist likely provides some amount of leadership and direction, which is labor with value, but their compensation vastly exceeds the value they generate. This is why you see CEOs getting >300x the pay of their employees. The labor of these CEOs is not worth that much. One person’s labor literally cannot be worth that of 300 people. (Engineers may pipe in on that point, but please realize you’re in the same boat.)
If you see capitalism from this perspective, it makes sense why you would be angry. You’re literally getting short-changed for your effort. Not cool
So what’s the alternative? Well, there’s a bunch. Personally, I like the idea of employee-owned companies. This way, you get the advantage of pooling people’s resources, and any profit can be invested back into the company to generate more wealth for its employees or be held onto in case of a downturn. Both are better than a CEO’s pocket.
One issue is capital investment. Starting a company is expensive, and many companies take a long time to become profitable. If every company had to bootstrap, we’d see much fewer successes and much slower progress. I’m not exactly sure how to solve this, yet. Would love to hear folks’ ideas
This point is even stronger if you look at property rights instead of value. The workers in a capitalist firm jointly receive 0% of the property rights to the produced outputs and 0% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs while the employer receives 100% and legally owns the produced outputs and legally owes the liabilities for the used-up inputs. This is a violation of the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match
Thank you for taking the education angle. I’d like to add another perspective for folks’ benefit. I’m not 100% sure it’s correct, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
Your labor has some value. Ideally, you should be paid a corresponding amount of wealth to the amount of value you generate through your labor. So you do $20 worth of work and get $20 worth of money. This is the ideal.
But how much labor is worth $20? Capitalism takes advantage of this ambiguity. The capitalist, e.g. a business owner or investor or similarly positioned person, pays you $19 for that $20 labor and pockets the remaining amount as profit. Sure, the capitalist likely provides some amount of leadership and direction, which is labor with value, but their compensation vastly exceeds the value they generate. This is why you see CEOs getting >300x the pay of their employees. The labor of these CEOs is not worth that much. One person’s labor literally cannot be worth that of 300 people. (Engineers may pipe in on that point, but please realize you’re in the same boat.)
If you see capitalism from this perspective, it makes sense why you would be angry. You’re literally getting short-changed for your effort. Not cool
So what’s the alternative? Well, there’s a bunch. Personally, I like the idea of employee-owned companies. This way, you get the advantage of pooling people’s resources, and any profit can be invested back into the company to generate more wealth for its employees or be held onto in case of a downturn. Both are better than a CEO’s pocket.
One issue is capital investment. Starting a company is expensive, and many companies take a long time to become profitable. If every company had to bootstrap, we’d see much fewer successes and much slower progress. I’m not exactly sure how to solve this, yet. Would love to hear folks’ ideas
This point is even stronger if you look at property rights instead of value. The workers in a capitalist firm jointly receive 0% of the property rights to the produced outputs and 0% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs while the employer receives 100% and legally owns the produced outputs and legally owes the liabilities for the used-up inputs. This is a violation of the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match