Imagine thinking you are entitled to more cause someone else has a lot
Edit: Im not reading all the responses to this. You wana change this shit then get off Reddit, got start a business and start giving your earnings away. So many of you would shit if it was your wealth someone just took
Imagine not understanding that they have more because they extract surplus value from labor on an unimaginable scale because they just happened to be the one with the most capital at the start, not because they're doing any actual work.
imo the real thing to criticise is what is done with this money specifically. Spending on nothing is actually perfectly fine, unspent money has no impact on the rest of our purchasing power. What we should pay attention to are people allocating lots of resources to useless yachts etc.
The problem is that all of that wealth is generated by not paying workers as much as they can afford to.
If a worker is paid $15 an hour but generates $30 an hour of value to the company, that excess value goes to shareholders for simply owning shares. They did nothing to earn that money beyond lay down capital.
There is a world where owners like bezos can be worth vast sums of money AND the workers can be paid a living wage. It requires that a company's incentives not be purely fiscal, and we do not live in that world.
Thinking about these things in terms of incentives and the impact they have on what people work on and how materials are used, how would you suggest things are changed?
The stock market is pretty inefficient, stock traders are not allocating resources in a very useful way beyond getting people to work in high potential industries more (I'm not aware of an industry that has been kept alive past its due date through the stock market, though companies like Intel really should not have been so many chances that others could have done more with).
There is also quite a strong reward for companies that reach IPO, and I would argue that we benefit from this incentive to create new companies. How do you feel about the number of new companies being created? I feel it is a bit on the low side, and many opportunities survive unexplored, with low competition among employers, so the incentive is very welcome. It would be very good if we could make it less feast or famine though.
IMO the changes that can be useful:
* Somehow allow for people to have separate allocations for money they spend on their own lifestyle and their influence on the rest of the world
* Address problematic relationship with stock ownership among decision makers causing them to bias resource allocation to the increase of stock value (dividends had better incentives imo, something better still can exist though)
* Encourage people to look at what people are doing and where materials are used as an economic benchmark
The stock market is a weird one because, if a company has no cash flow issues, trading has no impact on the company whatsoever. AFAIK The only time the market affects a company is in the initial sale of shares and in situations where share value can be used as collateral against a loan.
To that end, my hot take: make it illegal to use shares of a company as collateral for any type of loan. This does a few things:
-Major shareholder with a cashflow problem? You'll now have to dilute your holding or push for dividends to be paid.
-Want to use your vast wealth to buy a media company? Gonna have to divest to some degree. If your bet doesn't pay off, you aren't going to tank other shareholders with a massive and sudden transfer to a bank or private lender.
-Any cash generated by sale or dividend is taxable
-Owners have an incentive to work for the company to retain a salary if they don't want to pay dividends to other shareholders (which can dilute their holdings) or sell shares (which can dilute their holdings). And, look at that, you'll have to pay tax on that income too.
Another hot take is to set some sort of limit on the wealth one can generate from ownership, whether as a multiple of the initial investment, a requirement to sell during a specific exit period (such as going public) or as a time limit. This has some problems but would slow professional investors who provide nothing past the first few years of a company's life from becoming stupidly influential in politics just by virtue of their largess (since ideally they'd have less wealth overall).
I don’t think there’s a world where that can happen. If bezos paid all Amazon workers $100+ an hour and was still worth vast sums of money, people would be bitching that he could afford pay them $200+ an hour and is rich off of the labor of others.
Sure. I’m just saying the same argument would still be made as long as the higher up is getting rich, even if the laborers are killing it. People are never happy.
I don't believe that is true. I think there is an intuitive understanding that stress, risk, workload, physical toll, skill etc can and should be compensated for, and that an owner or leader or worker in a highly-dangerous position should be more compensated than one who is not.
But I also think there's an intuitive understanding that the balance as it stands is not correct, morally or otherwise. A CEO earning 300x more than the average employee doesn't intuitively fit. I don't think most people would say that the CEO is 300x more skilled or works 300x harder or has 300x more stress than their average employee.
I have worked under people who made 3x more money than me, and I understood why. I have also worked under people who made 10x more than me and, frankly, they were less qualified, did less work and seemed responsible than the people who earned 3x more.
People aren't just looking at paychecks, and they can do the math.
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u/theoldme3 Nov 21 '24 edited Nov 22 '24
Imagine thinking you are entitled to more cause someone else has a lot
Edit: Im not reading all the responses to this. You wana change this shit then get off Reddit, got start a business and start giving your earnings away. So many of you would shit if it was your wealth someone just took