Why is it admirable for Mr./Ms. X to pay their employees peanuts in order to retain earnings for themselves? Wouldn’t they be more worthy of respect if they chose to share the profits with the employees who earned them?
Just not sure why people need 5 houses and 20 cars, or why the rest of us tolerate them.
Um, because it’s none of our business?
Why should the masses dictate to the minority how to behave? I believe this country was founded on principles of individual freedom and minority rights.
People have the right, within limits, to do what they want with their wealth, but personally, I don’t think that many people would actually find this kind of business behaviour
to be all that admirable. And I might add that it’s a lot easier to exercise personal freedom and rights when you’re not earning peanuts. But you already knew that, right?
Why is it that you seem to think that one is usually a result of the other?
Haj
I think their employees should find other jobs that don’t pay peanuts.
If they can’t, then perhaps “peanuts” is precisely what their labor is worth.
Labor, like any commodity, is worth what a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. An employer that is truly underpaying his employees will soon have no employees left; they will flock to those that pay them more. If no one is willing to pay more… then their labor isn’t worth more.
Theres a general underlying assumption I think that extreme wealth is undesirable. How many people discuss the admirable traits of Bill Gates? (maybe some…but not often) However the media is partly to blame for any views idolizing wealth. Is Ted Turner really going to air shows that decry millionaire wealth?
I have a lot of discussions lately about money. One of the endearing qualities about money is that it gives you the freedom to do what you want and to eliminate the shitty character traits that result from being poor (desperation, jealousy, etc) This is probably where the admiration of wealth comes from. I think most wealthy/well off people find ways to rationalize how little they give to others, or find ways to procrastinate doing so.
Interesting responses.
I was sort of thinking along the same lines as you, Quasimodal; that what wealth actually represents is the opportunity to elevate oneself. That looks more simplistic than it sounded in my mind, but anyway.
I’m not saying that all wealth is the result of worker exploitation, or that government should interfere to re-set the laws of supply and demand.
It just seems funny that we’re all willingly (in the U.S.) participating in a system that elevates a few at the cost of many. Other than an underlying belief that we are somehow special could be one of the few, why on earth would we choose to do that?
Through various jobs that I have had, I have met may of these “super wealthy.”
What has led them to becoming super wealthy is not being super greedy, but rather super driven. Everyone of them had at one time “worked for peanuts” and through hard work, improved their situations. Most admitted to having had a lucky break of one type or another along the way, but if they hadn’t been in there working for it, they wouldn’t have been in a position to to take advantage of the lucky break. At a certain point they look at money not so much as something that they can use to acquire more things, but as a scorecard.
Do you think Tiger Woods practices day after day to improve his golf game because he is greedy and just wants more money to buy another yacht or mansion? I think he does it because he is driven to be the best golfer he can be. And because of his drive (pun intended) and natural ability, he is worth almost 400 million dollars.
There is an old joke about the guy who says he is working on making his second million. When asked how he made his first million, he says he hasn’t yet, he just heard the second million is much easier to make than the first million, so he figured he’d start there. ( I know that isn’t quite right, anyone remember how that joke goes?) But I think there is a lot of truth to that. Someone who shows success at making money is much more likely to continue to make money, and eventually they end up super wealthy.
Of course there are exceptions, but as a rule I don’t think it is about greed, it is about hard work, taking risks, being at the right place at the right time, and natural talent, and those are admirable traits, worthy of respect.
Firstly this is not how I view the super wealthy because I’m not communist. If someone finds a commodity to provide for society and ends up with more money than someone else I don’t think that is a problem. IN fact the idea that everyone should have an equivalent income disgusts me to the very core, and I feel it strikes at much of what make society work so well.
Plus employees in business terms are just a business expense, or a cost of doing business, they aren’t investors or owners so they just simply aren’t entitled to anything more than the salary they have agreed upon with their employers (unless of course they also own stock in the company.)
And that salary is a good rough approximation of the market value for their skills. And if they disagree they can try and sell those skills at a higher price, and sometimes succeed.
With slavery as the bottom line, apparently an acceptable one for Bricker. Because if no one is willing to hire you unless you sign papers that amount to enslavement, then that’s your worth, right?
Here’s an interesting concept to try out: When one group has an unequal power relationship with another, the one that has the most power is the one that doesn’t want to talk about the nature of the relationship.
They try to persuade members of that other group that things like that “are none of their business” when they can.
I don’t think there are many people of any income who claim that rich are better than the non rich. However, there are those who claim that the rich are, by definition, smarter than the non-rich. While I think this is true in more ways than just high-powered professions (you need more smarts to be a good con man or sports star than your average job,) the postulate overlooks that:
– Some people are not driven by greed for money as a primary motive in life.
– Some people are intelligent in ways that are not recognized by society.
While I don’t harbor any resentment towards the ultra-rich as long as I have food on my table and they are paying their fair share of taxes, once in awhile I do run into them, or their apologists, trying to win an argument by claiming that since they are rich, they know better than the non-rich. Which is BS.
Your first name IRL wouldn’t be “Horatio” would it, Grits? I’ve met a few wealthy folks in my life, too, and they varied tremendously. Most were unimpressive people who got a LOT of lucky breaks in life, mostly having to do with being born to wealthy parents.
I learned very early how much it takes to be wealthy. My wife and I were at a small airport when a retinue came through, shepherding two small kids, the youngest of whom looked like he’d only been walking upright for about a year. Mrs. Evil Captor informed me that they were the children of a Louisiana oil millionaire, and that one of them was worth $3 million and one was worth $4 million.
I was 24 and had been working more or less constantly for 7 years at the time. I had earned barely a pittance of what these post-toddlers were worth through many long hours of labor. I observed that they must be very special toddlers to have contributed so much more to society than I had.
Magnify this inequity across whole classes of people, and you have the magnitude of the problem of the way wealth gets distributed in America. Statistically, very few people get into the wealthy elite, your Horatio Alger stories to the contrary.
Erm, that line SHOULD read
Statistically, very few people get into the wealthy elite from the middle or lower classes.
That is, there might be a large absolute number of people who get wealthy in a given generation, but they represent less than 5 percent of all the weatlhy people … probably closer to 1 or 2 percent. Not much churn there, even in America.
Because 1) you have no choice and 2) it is the most effective system out there.
Basically unless you inherit money or win the lottery, no one is going to give you anything in life. You have to work for it. If you are lucky, maybe you are good enough at something that someone will be willing to pay a lot of money to do it.
It sounds like some people have entitlement issues. Why SHOULD anyone make more than what they are making now. Because you think its “unfair” that some people have more money? What should decide how much people make? How much money is “too much”.
The mere act of being an employee does not make one a slave or mean that the employers are exploiting their workers. Who’s backs are the Brittney Spears and Tiger Woods building wealth off of?
Yeah but it also gives you the freedom to indulge in other character traits - gluttony, arrogance, rudeness, and so on.
You know, my dad was an immigrant from El Salvador, and I grew up dirt poor.
Today, I am in pretty good financial shape.
I didn’t do anything that anyone else couldn’t do.
The ancients knew when the boundary between fine living and crapulence or gluttony had been breached. Are you saying our economy and society have reached such a state of perfection and justice that those concepts no longer have any relevance?
Communism sucks.
It had to be said.
There are viable political states between absolute Communism and rampant Free-Marketeering (translation: the rich get richer, everyone else is shafted), you know.
So why have minimum wage standards been legislated in all first-world industrial countries? Why has the government needed to step in to require employers to stump up an essential subsistence salary?
Becuase it turns out that requiring employers to pay a barely-livable wage has an overall lower cost to society than either having the wqorking class put on welfare or having them starving in the streets (and resorting to crime or revolution).
The OP is suggesting the rich are guilty of something, and similar rhetoric is never far from the mind of someone preaching communism. Sure, viable middle ground exists, with an effort to acheive two goals:
[ul][li]Ensure as much personal freedom as possible for the individual, and[/li][li]Ensure no-one starves to death[/ul][/li]
The western democracies manage to (mostly) meet the second goal without tromping too much on the first. I’m skittish about anyone who states or implies the first goal should be modified without a damn good reason, and immature observations about “greed” don’t qualify.