In economic terms, it’s probably should be priced a lot more than $119. It’s the one mass-market operating system for PC-compatible computers that there is- there’s a little bit of a Linux market, but outside of that, Windows is all there is.
Microsoft could legitimately charge a shitload for it without much recourse- there are no substitutes and it’s a critical component. Not charging a price that’s in the same league as the rest of the computer is literally leaving money on the table. People would grumble, but they’d pay $300 for Windows.
Whether or not we think it’s “worth” it in the sense of craftsmanship and what-not, is a separate story.
Obviously you think it is worth $119 or you wouldn’t buy it.
It is not only not counterfactual, it is obvious. In any voluntary exchange, the buyer and seller both give up something they value less for something they value more. I want a copy of Windows more than I want $119, Microsoft wants $119 more than a copy of Window. We exchange, both come out with something that they value more than what they had. If you don’t think something is worth what is being asked, you don’t buy it.
So yes - in every voluntary exchange, the buyer thinks the seller is providing something of more value than that for which it was exchanged.
Y’know, when you come into a discussion like this with “any exchange is necessarily voluntary and beneficial for both parties”, it’s really not particularly helpful. Oh, so you’ve heard of homo economicus? That’s great. But if we have to explain the absolute basics every time this comes up, it’s just kind of annoying. You’re coming into a discussion on relativity with the “racecar on a train” thought experiment. If you’re not going to take a crash course in behavioral economics, maybe at least start here, read through at least section A, and then come back and try again.
Are you complaining to me? septimus is the one who doesn’t seem to understand this very basic idea. And neither of your cites refute anything I’ve said.
It does not and I do not. They did not take all that money from me. Or you. Or anyone. They may have taken some of it. Doubtless you can find a few individual wealthy scoundrels whose wealth is primarily the result of transactional profits, compensation, dividends, but simply being wealthy does not require you to have decreased anyone else’s piece of the pie or taken that wealth from others. The drop in total real US net worth 2007-2009 and the increase since then don’t represent transfers of wealth out of and into the country of tens of trillions of dollars.
I did not intend to imply that EVERY dollar collected by billionaires was useless rent on “the pie.” And it appears you may be in agreement that SOME of those dollars ARE useless rent.
I’d just like to know who is “we,” and why do “we” care about other people’s money? The truth of the matter lies in the correct answers to those questions.
The problem is, the question becomes, “As opposed to what?” Do the wealth owners get the choice, or is it forced upon them by one or more governments?
“Uh, no, you’re not investing $1 billion in More Hotels In Downtown Indianapolis So We Don’t Go Through The GenCon Crisis Every Year, or a Private Manned Mission to Mars; we’ve already decided that you have to spend it on the New Green Deal first, then implementing Single-Payer Health Care, then the rest of our laundry list.”
I have nothing against progressive taxes. I think we should tax the shit out of rich people.
My complaint is in the idea that it is morally wrong to be rich. Suggesting that the rich people are inherently evil for being rich is a very dangerous path to go down.
I’ve already mentioned the tens of billions siphoned off annually by the financial sector with little or no gain to the real economy. (Whether these are called “rents” or not is irrelevant.)
The Lamborghinis driven by Wall Street traders don’t grow on trees, nor do they reward the traders for any contribution to the real economy. Those luxury items are a “share of the pie” no longer available to those who do contribute. The transfer of wealth is hidden — the traders in effect get a tiny percentage of financial trades.
And that’s just one example. Perhaps some useless rent-collecting could be attacked legislatively, but it’s very hard to do in general. To address the Wall Street example, small transaction taxes might have merit.
Of course this discussion is going down the wrong road. The real reason to tax the rich is NOT because their gains were ill-gotten, but because that’s where the money is. And, since much taxation ends up in the form of income transfers, society may make a judgement that food and medicine for children is a better value dollar-for-dollar than Lamborghinis.
We don’t take away that billionaire’s extra sports-car to punish him! The whole point is to put the wealth or income to “better” use.
Well it is nice that you admit that you don’t know what CEO’s do but odd that you still feel qualified to have an opinion on whether they are worth the money they get paid to do what they do.
CEOs can have a huge impact on a business, when Jack Welch took over as CEO of GE it had a market cap of 15 billion dollars, when he retired 20 years later it was worth 594 billion dollars. Almost 20 years after he retired the company is worth about 75 billion dollars. When Steve Ballmer announced that he was retiring as CEO of Microsoft the stock went up 18 billion dollars in one day.
CEOs are not nearly deities but clearly a good one or a bad one can make a huge difference in the success or failure of a company. A researchpaper found that in founder run firms, the profit falls 75% after the owner retires or dies.
I just want to address this “non-zero-sum” argument about the economy that seems to have come up here quite a lot in defense of billionaires. Of course the economy is not zero-sum. And of course a few rich innovators have contributed to it and to our general well-being (though many have not). And of course innovators and sensible risk-takers doing useful things deserve to be rewarded. If they become millionaires, more power to them, though they should be subject to responsible progressive taxation.
But when a single person is able to amass $140 billion in personal wealth, that is a figure of such staggering magnitude – an amount much larger than the entire GDP of Hungary, Kuwait, and at least 132 other countries – that it should be seen as a red flag of a systemic national problem. That kind of money doesn’t come primarily from “growing the pie” or anything else; it comes from other people, and in Bezos’ case, a big part of it comes from all those other retailers that Amazon has put out of business and millions of their employees that it has put out of jobs.
I thought I saw $147 billion somewhere as Bezos’ net worth, and used that figure below, but what’s a few tens of billions between friends! That there is a systemic national problem should be fairly self-evident: the US is the only developed country in the world without universal health care, which it claims it cannot afford, despite being the richest country in the world. According to UNICEF, in 2013 the US had the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world, despite being the richest country in the world. At least 43 million Americans live in poverty, including about 16.7 million children living in what are considered “food insecure” households. Bezos could afford to give every single one of those 16.7 million hungry children $8000, and still have more money left than any human could possibly know what do with; for instance, with the leftover money after giving away 91% of his wealth, he could still buy around 60 brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliners.
I think it’s pointless to argue whether possessing such wealth is “moral” or not, though it seems hard to justify such an unimaginably vast difference in putative value between one human being and another. But there is an important and pragmatic argument to be had about the extreme economic inequalities and ills that it’s symptomatic of, and the social tensions and divisiveness that it creates.
ETA:
I didn’t see your post at the time I made mine, nor was I aware of what AOC had said, but this systemic argument is exactly the point I was making.
AOC wasn’t talking about “the 7.5 Billion people on the planet”:
Given that she represents New York City, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that that’s the city she was referring to. I’m open to the possibility that various socialist states (Venezuela, in particular, comes to mind right now) have failed so badly that people might “work 80 hour weeks and can’t feed feed their kids”, but here in America? In New York City? C’mon man, virtually nobody starves to death in America, and certainly not any significant number of people working 80 hours a week can’t afford food.