I don't think access to capital is a mitigating factor. It doesn't really matter why you can't pay a wage that a worker can live on. If you can't do it you should go out of business.

So now people who are trying to make a living with a small business don’t deserve to be in business but tech bro’s who can convince people to invest billions in companies that will probably never be profitable should stay in business?

Especially since we know that most venture funding goes to people who “pattern match” with Zuckerburg not the people who are running small businesses.

Yeah that’s going to make the poor better off while people in tech shake their finger at them - or in other words let them eat cake!

If low margin companies don’t deserve to be in business then why do money losing companies deserve to be in business? What if we made it against the law for public pensions to invest in VC funds or made it illegal for companies that don’t show that they can be profitable to be listed on the public market?

This is whataboutism. Believing that businesses who can’t afford to pay their staff a living wage shouldn’t exist doesn’t entail any position on the issue of unprofitable tech companies.

Why not? Left to their own devices they couldn’t afford to pay their employees anything.

The mom and pop shop can’t get millions of dollars thrown at them because they “pattern match” what a successful founder “looks like” without a business plan. They actually have to be profitable.

Suppose that this was fixed, and tech companies had to be profitable to stay in business, like mom and pop shops. Would that do anything to improve the circumstances of the McDonald’s worker described in this article?

Would it do the worker or the franchise owner (who on average makes between $65K and $150K a year) any good if the company was out of business?

What if capital wasn’t chasing after money losing startups where the VC partners take 20% management fees no matter how badly the fund performs - much of that money coming from public pensions?