What is the “ownership class”?
What is the alternative? That the value of the work being done doesn’t belong to the people paying for it? How would that work, you pay a contractor to build you a house, and at the end of the day, you pay him $500K. Then, he gets your money, and he gets your house too?
Yes, correct. Because they are paying me for it. If I work for myself, I own my own labor, and whatever I produce with that labor. If I work for someone else, they give me money for my labor, and thereby own my labor and whatever I produce.
I can retain partial ownership of the products of my labor by buying stock in the company that employs me if they offer it.
Regards,
Shodan
Being filthy rich is absolutely normal and should not be discouraged. Pretty much everyone would agree that sharing is good, but money (or rather all the comforts it provides) is probably the most popular type of motivation for an average individual. Special tax rulings are, of course, appropriate in this case and quite sufficient.
Just put yourself in Jeff Bezos’ shoes for a moment. Why do your accomplishments have to be rewarded the same way a regular warehouse worker’s are?
It’s definitely annoying to realize that someone can afford luxury living while you can’t even pay your essential bills. It might even be that I’m working harder than most of the big shots out there and my work involves health risk and all, but why should they care? Why do the problems of a random set of people have to concern someone who wants to enjoy life while also having enough worries of their own? And yes, those ARE petty in comparison to the life struggles of some of us, but who are we to demand something from a person we don’t even know?
Let’s not be idiotic about it.
I pay $500K, I get a house. Who gets the wealth created by that transaction?
Should the wealth go to the person whose hands built the house? How about the person who cut down the trees, or the person who milled the lumber? The person who transported all the supplies, or manufactured the nails, or built the machine that made the insulation? All these people labored to create the things that we now call a house, should they get a piece of the wealth created? How big a piece?
Or, should all that wealth go to shareholders of USG, Weyerhauser and Owens Corning? How big a piece do they get?
Over the past 40 years the dynamic has changed and the shareholder piece has gotten larger than it was in the 50’s-70’s. Not because it’s right, but because the wealthy have pushed to make it that way.
The transaction itself created very little, if any wealth. As I’ve already pointed out, most new wealth in this country is not the result of summed production over time, but in increased valuation.
The point is, that each person along the way, from the construction crew, to the lumber providers, to the transportation folks, etc. all were paid for their service. Their portion of the transaction is finished and beyond the agreed upon price, they should get zero. You being the person who paid for the house, get the entire house, and any incident appreciation or depreciation.
The construction crew that got paid for their work doesn’t share in the ownership or the change in value of the underlying asset they physically built but do not own.
And we circle back to the point, which is that what they get paid, the price they are able to negotiate for their service is highly dependent upon the economic system in which they operate.
A system adjusted for decades by the wealthy to ensure that the wealthy have all the negotiating advantages possible.
Both sides get the value created by the exchange. You get the house that you want more than the $500K, the builders get the $500K that they want more than their labor.
The system is set up to encourage successful risk-taking. Successful risk-taking, when it pays off, is good for everybody. Wal-Mart delivers cheap goods efficiently. Amazon sells all kinds of stuff efficiently. Bill Gates created a hugely successful software company. Etc.
Not all risks are successful. Most companies fail. But we want to encourage it, because when it pays off, it pays off for everybody.
If you delay gratification and invest your money, you tend to get richer over time. If you spend everything you have, you tend not to. That’s not the wealthy gaming the system, it’s how the universe operates.
Regards,
Shodan
My ex, who makes $17.50/ hr in the SF Bay area, bought a house in 2008 or 9 which a few years before that had gone for over $400K in a short sale. So that lender lost money, the then-owner lost a home and a good credit report, and she gained a home that is closing in on it’s original value. She is now one of the very few homeowners in her family and is equity rich: still struggling, but now has an estate for her children.
So if the rich stand by and let you tax them as much as you want to, which is totally unrealistic, you could raise an extra 5% of total tax revenue, enough money to cut the deficit by 20%, or optimistically pay for 5% of Medicare for all
If it was good for everybody, I’d be on your side. The system encourages risk taking by skewing the payoff to the people taking the risk. That’s fine and all, but it does that by skewing the payoff away from the people not taking the risk, the working class.
So, no, the payoff isn’t good for everybody, it’s good for the risk takers. It’s designed to be good for the risk takers. And the risk takers are becoming richer and richer while most people tread water.
As well, the idea that the wealthy are “risk takers” is a bit of a laugh. Yes, they put up big money, but they’re not risking anything critical. You want to talk taking a risk? Let’s have a working class joe demand better pay, walking away if he doesn’t get a good enough deal. A factory worker, an hourly worker at the store. That guy is putting everything at risk, his home, insurance, his family’s security. That’s risk.
The value of that work in monetary terms is only what someone else is willing to pay for it.
If someone with a sick wife and 3 small kids to feed makes a shitty clay pot and takes 4 hours to make it, it remains a shitty clay pot and will be worth less than a defect-less mass-produced one made in China in a second and a half by a machine, because people are willing to pay for non-shitty pots.
That’s it. Shitty pots are shitty pots, regardless of who made them, how long they took, or how many tears were shed in the making.
Same thing for labor; the demand for a certain set of skills and experience combined with the number of people looking for jobs who have that set of skills and experience are going to determine what a person’s wage is. Employers don’t want to pay ANYONE more than they think they absolutely have to. But in the case of a burger-flipper, there’s very, very little to distinguish him from millions of other minimally skilled people who also want that job, so they won’t pay much. Conversely, a world-class striker in soccer is someone who has a set of skills and experience that place him in a set of a few dozen people world wide, and there’s a LOT of demand for that level of skill among professional soccer teams. So they get paid a LOT.
I do love how your argument centers on the worker being a shitty worker. I suppose when the assumption is that the working class guy is a worthless fuckup it’s easy to convince yourself that they deserve nothing for their effort.
I hope the irony of this being written using some sort of technogical wonder electronic device and being posted on the internet isn’t lost on anyone.
The payoffs are not being skewed. That’s how the universe operates, and has done since the first time some hunter-gatherer decided not to sit by the fire but to go out and try to kill something bigger than he was with the new spear-thrower he invented.
Why should I be rewarded for not doing anything? I didn’t take any of the risk. You aren’t going to encourage risk taking by reducing the payoff.
“What’s that you’re carrying, Ogar? A bow and arrow, you say? And you’re going to try to hunt with it? Sure, go ahead. I’ll wait here. And I’ll expect half of whatever you kill.”
Fast forward fifty thousand years, and now Ogar is a billionaire. And you still think you’re entitled to half.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s close to, but not quite off the charts wrt this board anyway. 
Quit being an ass. That’s not what I was trying to imply at all.
I was saying that the level of effort put in, or the need of the worker isn’t germane to what the value of their effort is. And I was using a clay pot as something someone could make as the product of their labor, i.e. what they were doing to get paid. A clay pot is a lot more concrete than some more nebulous abstract work product like many clerical workers produce.
That’s why the guy running the clay pot molder doesn’t get paid anything but a master potter can charge a lot. And why you’d probably have to pay someone to take most kids’ art class pots off your hands.
What I’m saying is that if he’s making shitty pots that nobody wants to buy, he’d better figure out how to make less shitty pots. Nobody owes him money for shit pots.
People in modern society can’t just up and “go hunt their own food” like Ogar. Even Ogar presumably lived in a society where hunters shared their kills with people who took care of the non-hunting activities.
I’m pretty sure the rest of the village wouldn’t tolerate Ogar killing every animal he can find and sitting on more meat than he could eat in a dozen lifetimes.