Is what this boils down to this: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?
You don’t have a coherent plan for the distribution of wealth. The marxists did. Libertarians do. Social democrats (Republicans and Democrats alike) do not unless is simply that the majority should decide. If that is the case, why are they constantly arguing that there is some ephemeral line to be drawn that vanished as soon as you glance at it. Is it just sophistry? Public relations? Appeal to emotion?
So, individuals make decisions to hire politicians that change the laws in ways those individuals favor. Such as to create a system of taxation and labor law that favors wealth creation in the less wealthy classes than the more wealthy classes. See? Individuals making decisions with wealth distribution as a consequence.
Actually, it makes tremendous sense. On a day to day basis, people have a very difficult time managing the long term societal impact of their decisions. Rather than manage those decisions individually, you manage them collectively.
Or, people are in a poor negotiating position for certain agreements, but in a stronger position elsewhere, so they use their power (where they have it) to impact results in areas where they are weak.
For example, I’m poor and have a shitty job. My employer treats me like crap, but I need to eat this week, so I take his crap because I don’t have the power to tell him to fuck off. On election day, I’m just as powerful as he is, and I (along with the other workers he shits on) vote in a government that supports my right to collectively bargain, and implements laws protecting my rights, etc. I now have more power to tell my employer to fuck off, and can negotiate a better labor deal for myself, or implement laws requiring him to treat all of his employees better.
So the people his wealth is distributed to will have a more legitimate claim to have earned it?
If I make a voluntary contract with an employee, what is wrong about me getting the profits. He understands the arrangement. Everyone else should not be concerned with how our arrangement distributes the proceeds of the work.
So I can hire someone else to use force to distribute resources to my liking? No your taxation system is interfering with the individual’s decision to give someone money.
No you don’t manage them at all. The government does not act in accordance with my directives. The individual has no control of govt resources directly or indirectly, therefore to call it management is a misnomer.
Their power is brute force violence. Not an ingredient in a civilized society.
Your employer has offered you a better deal than anyone in the entire world. You have demonstrated this by choosing to work for him over all others. Why use force against him instead of everyone else who offered you a worse deal. Again, no sense to it.
I’m one person. I build a machine that makes golden eggs from dirt. I buy dirt. I hire someone to operate it. I hire another person to sell the eggs. I lounge in a hammock.
Everyone loves the eggs and values them highly. Money pours in. Wealth is amassed.
Say I keep the all the wealth and pay the machine operator a standard operator wage and the salesman a standard salary. I pay standard prices for dirt.
Who have I deprived? The machine operator? The salesman? The consumer? Someone else? Please be specific.
What is the valuable part of a company? Is it the workers? Absent Bezos the workers would not have spontaneously organized themselves into Amazon.
Is it the idea? I don’t think Bezos was the first person to think of selling stuff online.
Is it the technology? There was nothing that built Amazon that was not commercially available to any other company.
What is valuable is the skill to combine an idea, the technology, and the people in a way that creates value. Bezos is not skimming off the value of his employees, he is combining the skill of his employees with the infrastructure he organized so that their productivity is higher than it would be without the infrastructure.
Organizing people to reach a goal is the most valuable skill in the world. That is why a general is more important than a private even though in any given battle a private may kill many people and the general personally kills no one. In politics that is why FDR has a memorial built for him and the voters who voted for him do not. That is why Bill Bellicheck is more important to the Patriots than the players are.
Not an issue of deprivation but more the fact that you and the machine operator and the salesman do not negotiate terms from equal positions? This is why I personally have the greatest respect for those roach coach owners. They do it all. No “taking advantage” of someone who perhaps is starving and would take any shitty job for a dollar to survive. If you ran the machine and did the selling yourself not a soul would begrudge you your wealth.
Assume 20 years pass. The economy has grown due to technological advances, but 97% of that growth went to you. Virtually none of the economic growth went to anyone else.
Now you use your wealth to find politicians who support laws that take power away from labor and increase your power. You cut your own taxes and your workers taxes go up to make up the shortfall. Unions are abolished, campaign funding laws become moot.
You now own the political system which passes laws that ensure 97% of all wealth created goes to you and you alone.
Meanwhile your workers get angrier and angrier. Their living expenses go up but their wages stagnate. They’ve tried peaceful means of addressing the problem but the bribed politicians aren’t interests because they use race and religion to keep the workers divided. Soon they will push for more radical solutions like very confiscatory tax rates. If that doesn’t work, they may push for socialization of your egg making business, which will likely just create a different class of communist oligarchs.
But organizers are worth jack-shit without people to implement their ideas. I don’t see organizers as being much different than another person with a skill, perhaps less so. A carpenter can buy wood and build furniture to sell. An “organizer” can literally starve without others. Who is more “valuable”?
Everybody’s power is brute force violence. Your ability to own what you own is secured by someone willing to use brute force violence to keep it that way.
Sure, my theoretical crappy employer is giving me the best deal out of all the deals I currently have access to. That doesn’t mean it’s the best deal I could possibly get. Absent government support, I am negotiating from a very weak position, not just with my current employer, but all possible employers. So, I petition the government for support so that I can negotiate a better deal.
But, you say, that’s not fair, I’m using violence to interfere with the natural state of affairs. This natural state is very unnatural to begin with, my employer’s wealth is protected by the government, his legal status protected by corporate law, all backed up by the threat of violence against anyone who would act differently than the law says they should.
There is nothing unnatural about using the power of the government for ones own benefit, we all do it.
I didn’t deny that Bezos had something to do with that service. But because he owns it, he’s free to essentially define his own value within those conditions, and he has defined it in a way that I (and many others) find patently absurd. Your organizational talent may be impressive, but when your workers are slaving under sweatshop conditions for pay barely above minimum wage so that you can make literally more money than you know what to do with… Something has gone wrong.
Why should we negotiate from equal positions? He has the ability to provide services that many many others can also provide. I have created a wealth machine. People value the products that come from machine very highly. The salesman’s service is not valued so highly, but I have given him a better deal than all other people in the society.
My contribution to society is clear and is valued in accordance with that. The salesman’s contribution does not increase drastically simply because he works for my company instead of someone else’s company. If it does increase and I am keen enough to recognize it, he will jmprove his position in relation to mine and draw a better salary.
You are combining policies that are aggression against property (tax increases) and policies that improve recognition of property (ending state-mandated collective bargaining, anti-speech laws). Hard to proceed from there.
No. Most entrepreneurs and capitalists do not get help from the state.
Which is why most rich people are social democrats. They fear an uprising and social democracy is a conservative force that prevents competition.
Bezos uses brute force in his negotiations? Cite?
If you join with others to use force, why is that more legitimate than a bunch or rich guys doing the same thing? I think they will be better than you at it, actually. Perhaps this is why we have the state of affairs neither of us is ok with.
There is a natural law that is to be discovered through careful jurisprudence , but the government’s laws deviate from it considerably. Besides that, simply to claim that a mutually agreed upon contract is unnatural is not your place in my opinion.
If by natural as in it is in a biologically driven state of affairs for humans to control other humans, I don’t care for that type of “natural”. We can be more than animals.
You can’t solve the problems of poverty just by throwing money at them. Money is a necessary component of the solution, of course: You’re not going to accomplish much without money. But the bigger barrier is education. People aren’t born magically knowing how to do things like keep a budget and save money. Those things have to be taught. And if your parents never taught you, because they didn’t know how, then you’re not going to know how, either, and so won’t teach your children. That’s why poverty runs in families.
There are many potential issues with wealth inequality. But I’m not sure that is one of them.
I’m not sure stock buybacks are a real issue either.
The point is that he is the one who did it.
Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online book broker from a $250,000 loan from his parents. From that, he grew Amazon into the $800 billion dollar business it is today and his own net worth to $138 billion. In doing so, his company fundamentally transformed the way we buy stuff and he also managed to make a lot of other people wealthy.
Now maybe a better question than “does Bezos deserve his wealth?” is “does Amazon incur the costs of negative externalities to society/should it?” This is a question that comes up repeatedly with other disruptive companies like Uber and Airbnb.
For every Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry, I can find any number of capable carpenters to hammer some boards together and make a house.
Not really. A much more powerful reason is the social contract the majority of society engages in. Your ability to own what you own is secured by the fact that most people believe that a person owns what they own.
I didn’t mean to suggest that it’s more legitimate, it is equally legitimate. The wealthy use their power and influence to better their financial position, why shouldn’t the less wealthy?
I think it’s unrealistic (unfair, if you prefer) to expect the ownership class (or management class) of businesses to purposefully direct increased profits to their workforce, in any amount greater than necessary to run the business. That’s not how you run a business.
OTOH, I feel that a broad distribution of increasing profits is better for society as a whole, building a strong middle class, demand growth, etc. So, I support a legal framework that allows businesses to pursue growth and profit with all the zeal that they have today, but directs a portion of that profit to the working class. Not directed via the generosity of the owner, but as a cost of doing business.
NBA players make tens of millions of dollars but they would not be able to play without the guy who inflates the balls. Should the ball inflator make tens of millions as well?
Everyone would die a painful death without water. Diamonds are completely superfluous to most people. Which is more valuable diamonds or water?
Value creation is on the margin. The number of people who can put air in a basketball is not much smaller than the number of people in the world. The number of people who could play basketball in the NBA well enough to make a difference in a game is vanishingly small. The number of people who could possibly build furniture out of wood is at least in the hundreds of millions. The number of people who could build a company like Amazon is much, much, much, rarer.
Yes. So no, “wealth” hasn’t remained the same over time, but that tells us nothing about anything real in the world. “Make the pie bigger” is just smoke and mirrors.
No, you can have a claim to it, either from societal support or from force (or both). But to suggest that you actually created any of it is to laugh.