Splitting up the value of what a worker produces is exactly a zero sum game.
Let's say a worker can produce 100 units of product, which can be sold for a total of 100 currency. If that worker was self-employed and owned the necessary tools, the labour of producing 100 units of product would earn him 100 currency.
However, most workers do not own their tools and are employed by someone else. That employer, in exchange for providing the worker with tools, takes some of the value of the worker's labour - which is fair enough in principle, as the employer has to oversee the maintenance of the equipment and organisation of the workers and the selling of the product which also requires labour. However, in practice the employer usually appropriates a much larger fraction of the value produced by the worker such that the worker produces 100 units of product and is only recompensed with 50 or 30 or 10 units of currency. The employer can then hire someone else to do the administrative work, again playing them less than the economic value of their labour. Thus, the employer can gain a very large amount of currency without doing any labour at all himself, just because his name is on the right pieces of paper. Extend this over several orders of magnitude and a few generations and the effects of compound interest and you have people who earn more than most of the rest of the population combined without ever having had to do any work at all themselves. Meanwhile, everyone else is told to keep working for pay less than the worth of their labour in order to support this towering hierarchy or else they're lazy or, most ironically, parasites!
Bentley Murphy
>Splitting up the value of what a worker produces is exactly a zero sum game. Literally untrue "Value" is a totally arbitrary concept Prices are never fixed, nothing holds inherent value Currency is not wealth
You are babbling some insane commie nonsense
Jordan Martinez
Quite the opposite, but I still understand your frustration.
Luke Mitchell
The real costs to society is the cost of demotivation that an "unjust" system will spread. Skilled people giving up. Stopping to do their best. If that happens the value of rich peoples money will diminish. So in the end it becomes an economy of emotions. Make people motivated to work and your money will stay valuable.
Logan Robinson
Regardless of the fact the market value of a product may fluctuate, in order to employ someone you MUST pay them less than the money they make you.
Obviously. Otherwise you're running at a loss. How much less you pay them, or how much of your profits you pay in taxes to be (ostensibly) spent on things that better the lives of your workers, is the crux of the issue here.
Andrew Fisher
>thinking liberalism and neoliberalism are like terms It must be hard to get by being this retarded, you can't even use google.
Caleb Morales
>is the crux of the issue here. It's the crux for people who don't understand whats involved in running a business, still demand to be paid if the business is failing/losing money, and yet are too lazy or incompetent to start a business of their own.
Ian Richardson
so, if per capita income equality stays roughly the same but household income inequality is rising, that means one of two things imho: either household inequality is rising because the households with only one income are falling behind, or household inequality is rising because per capita income inequality is staying at the same ratio overall but shifting to different "regions" of income (which would get leveled out by the sum in the gini ratio and thus, could not be seen in the ratio itself). i could be wrong on this, however, i would prefer to see the curves for net income (inflation corrected) for individuals and households and see if your theory holds.
well, let me specify as well, then: i'm against total regulation, or much of any regulation in fact. i simply think that there are sectors for which the public does not benefit from deregulation (pharma, education and science, most notably) and which should thus be more heavily regulated, if not kept under direct government control. one could argue the same for certain parts of the financial sector, but this is (to a degree) already happening. as for unfixable market failures: well, i guess, so be it - to an extend. individuals should be protected from total annihilation of their economic situation, but this is taken care of by a functioning social welfare system which at least encourages finding work (see: Germany).
what i mean by encouraged violence and crime: when there is an increasing gap between the economically well-off and the less-so, classes tend to form. my favorite example is Europe, where austerity politics and generally insane economic decision by political leaders have forced entire classes of formerly well-established sectors of work into precarity, if not poverty, thus destroying any kind of future perspective for large numbers of society. this has led to violent outbreaks (Greece, Spain, France) and political unrest (Brexit, surge of right-wing politicians.
Mason Roberts
A business failing or losing money is obviously a special case (also are you implying that workers should stop being paid or have their pay docked if a company starts losing money?) and plenty of large companies make vast, vast profits while not paying out more than minimum wage to most workers, while shareholders and CEOs enjoy staggering wealth without having to expend much effort at all.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter how much effort or competence you can put in, you can't just >start a business without having a lot of money to begin with and the right connections and even if you do, unless you're going into a brand new field, then larger existing competitors can just stomp you or buy you out. And not to mention the implication that if no one was lazy or incompetent then every person would just start their own business and these problems would vanish all of a sudden.
Nolan Carter
I don't think most people are frustrated with the people starting businesses. I think they realize how much work and how tough that is - how much work is required. It's more frustration with that the unfairness of money growing so much quicker - almost automatically - if you already got a lot.
