And if the guy making minimum wage slapping hotdogs together doesn’t like it, why doesn’t he buy himself a hotdog cart, buy a bunch of buns and mustard and wieners and sauerkraut, and go into business for himself?
The answer is, it costs money to build a hotdog cart, therefore it costs money to buy one, it costs money to grow wheat and bake hot dog buns, therefore it costs money to buy them, and so on. Every piece of the hotdog stand coming in or going out or standing still costs money. If you want to own a hotdog stand you have to manage all those things. If you don’t do that, if you’re just slapping hotdogs together, what value did you create? A small amount of value, and your work can be done by millions of potential workers.
Of course the owner doesn’t “deserve” profits just because they own the stand. They don’t deserve profits for taking on risk. They don’t deserve anything. And neither does the guy who owns the cart factory, or the worker who works in factory, or the guy who slaps together hot dogs. The stand owner didn’t create the stand, but the worker who puts together the hotdogs with his hands didn’t create his own hands.
As the man said, Deserves got nuthin to do with it. None of us deserve anything. We came from nothing, and we will go back to nothing, and what have we lost? Nothing! The richest businessman or the most powerful politician in the world will someday be dead and will be food for worms. They might deserve all sorts of things, or might not, but one day they will crumble to dust, and everything they ever had or ever will have will be taken away.
So the question is, while we live, what sort of lives do we want to live? What sort of social rules and customs will allow us to lead our short lives with a maximum chance for happiness and a minimum chance for agony? What’s the best we can do, within the limits of human fallibility?
And it turns out that, in my opinion, the best we can do (for now) is the sort of organization found in North America and Europe and Japan and Australia and other first world countries–liberal democracy, a certain amount of social control, various unwritten rules of social interaction to lubricate the friction of millions of hairless apes living in close contact, an agreement to treat certain things as private property and certain other things as communal property.
Why? Because without those things we get Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia, or Maoist China, or anarchic Somalia. Or, like most countries, something in between. The more countries resemble first world countries the better off the people living there are, the less the more of a shithole they are.
So why does the laborer deserve the value of their own labor? In many places and times the laborer was considered just another form of personal property, and the fruit of their labor properly belong to the state, or the clan, or their feudal lord, or a private owner. The laborer doesn’t create himself, after all. He is created from his mother’s womb, nursed, fed, diapered, nose wiped, educated, and so on, all by the adults around him. Or not, and the child ends up dead because human children are utterly helpless without adult care.
Is that the kind of world we want to live in? Not me, I’d rather not see children dying in the streets, and so on. We can make whatever choices we want, but we are obligated to accept whatever consequences flow from those choices. Therefore, if we don’t want X, we are obligated to not choose Y if we know that Y will inevitably lead to X. Or, if we choose Y anyway, we should toughen up and stop whining about how unfair it is when X happens.
So we don’t have to allow private ownership of hotdog stands. But if we don’t allow private ownership of hotdog stands, we should accept that there aren’t going to be any hotdog stands. The consequences of various socio-politico-economic decisions might be hard to forsee, but clearly if we don’t allow economic integration larger than a single person we’re going to have to make do with handicrafts and subsistence farming rather than modern industrial civilization.