> Value that was created in the past is still value, is it not?

That's your claim, not ours. Cotton plantation owners made obscene profits from the literal blood of slaves. Did the plantation owners create the value? No, the slaves did. Did the slaves enjoy multiple generations of exponential growth of their net worth? No, the plantation owners were paid reparations, and the slaves got nothing. Descendents of plantation owners are strongly represented in Southern business and politics to this very day. Not because their ancestors made value but because they took it.

You seem to confuse "money" with "value."

> Did the plantation owners create the value? No, the slaves did.

I am 100% against slavery, period.

Who invented the incandescent lightbulb and the iPhone? The mass market automobile? Who built the railroads? None of these things can be fully credited to the small number of people at the top of the corporations responsible, but we can say fairly confidently they wouldn't have happened without a visionary leader aggregating the efforts of many into a final product.

I agree slaves were deprived of freedom and wages, which is not right. And that wealth is stolen.

That is different from the fact that it's been passed down through generations. I don't quarrel with the children of entrepreneurs having wealth passed down in the same way.

Conflating two arguments makes discussion more difficult.

Money and value are directly related. Money is just score keeping for value created. People pay money for things they value. That's not always going to be the case, but I think treating it as a rule with exceptions is a better heuristic than... what is your definition of value versus money?

Money can be used to measure value. If I offer you a billion dollars to chop off your arm and eat it raw, then your response to that offer indicates to me how much you value your health. But, if I'm a trillionaire, that billion dollars represents 0.1% of my total wealth, so the marginal cost to me is negligable. The perceived value of a dollar is proportional to the observer's wealth. Are they related? Sure, but it's way more complicated than that.

> Money is just score keeping for value created.

Yes and no. It's way more complicated than that. As demonstrated with the slavery example (nobody accused you of being pro-slavery, please chill), money is often score-keeping for handling money. People with power who participate in large transactions take a cut for themselves. In the case of slavery, the plantation owners got rich by what we consider outright theft today. Money and power follows their descendants, and for what? Did they create value? No, they're just rich off the proceeds of slavery.

Take Mozilla for example: developers are, by and large, the greatest value-creators at the company. So why does Mitchell Baker make $2.5M a year? What great value is she creating? Is she secretly an honest-to-goodness 10x developer? I see no evidence of such -- but because she's closest to the money, she makes decisions about the money, and folks at the board (who are, typically, CEOs at other orgs) agree that people who are closest to the money deserve to get the most money. In this example, the accumulation of wealth is not a record of created value but it's a record of power.

My definition of value is rather irrelevant. There is no universal definition, and I'd say that any precise definition is flawed. Especially one so simple as "value == money".

A flawed definition is superior to the absence of one.

You don't think the CEO of Mozilla is providing value?

I realize I'm sitting in idealistic terms, and it's to describe a point of view I'm not sure you fully understand. But at this point, I don't think it's that you don't understand it, you just don't care for the framework I'm describing. Perhaps you feel it's not important or useful to your life. I have found it to be a helpful lens, while certainly not all encompassing of the truth.

I had a more nuanced point I was going to make about slavery, hence the preface, but I realized it was probably not the right time or place.

> A flawed definition is superior to the absence of one.

I wholly disagree. According to the money=value definition, if I sell identical items at two prices, the one with the higher price is the better value. This is patently stupid. And people fall for it in droves, so I think it's dangerously stupid.

> You don't think the CEO of Mozilla is providing value?

In my personal opinion, I think she's driving the ship to ground; I'm fairly convinced that actions by the company under her watch have steeply reduced the value of the company. But, that isn't really what I said previously: I question if she's providing 10x the value of a senior developer -- this is a general question applicable to most executive salaries today. In the money=value paradigm, she's being paid that much and therefore she's obviously that valuable. Which, I hope you see why I think that's laughably foolish.