My father worked for 35 years as a carpenter on mega yachts for insanely rich people. Yes it put food on our table in a rural area otherwise devoid of job opportunities.

Rich people spending their money isn’t really the problem. It helped put me through college.

> Why does that hurt anyone?

Because those yachts were bought with money skimmed off our labor.

Ah yes the famed 0 sum game.

If that was the case, it should work both ways: when Bezos "lost" $20 billions of May 1st, how many skimmed labourers suddenly were able to afford $1 million houses ?

The notion that employers are unfairly collecting economic rent from their employees doesn't require it to be a zero-sum game.

Who’s paying less than they expected in today’s market? If anything it’s the other way round right now—lots of people are taking jobs for more money than they expected.

It doesn't matter what's "expected in today's market" from this perspective, either, since the market can be extremely skewed in terms of bargaining power.

What matters is 1) how much wealth any given employee generates, and 2) how much of that generated wealth they retain. Anything that doesn't end up in their pockets, and is not a business expense otherwise, is economic rent collected by their employer.

I don't think you want to go down this path. The majority of the workers would likely be a net loss with gains attributable to a much smaller set of workers. I don't think people would like their income clawed back because they didn't end up generate excess wealth for the company.

> If that was the case, it should work both ways

Why would it? The notion that "it should work both ways" assumes that "both ways" are equally viable.

It's not the yachts that hurts. It's the vast amounts of political power that their wealth gives them and that they invariably use to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The yachts aren't issue, i think the issue is more the insane amount of power that kind of money gives individual people (instead of institutions , which tend to have more checks and balances)

Some people are different than others. Some more so.