Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it.

If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. If the employees think that what they agreed to work for is no longer sufficient, they are welcome to renegotiate their compensation or, if they feel they have been wronged and are being paid less than they are worth, to take their talent to a different employer. After all, everything so far has been consensual. The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.

This completely negates the fact that due to how the labor market is structured, most people who sell their labour to survive are in a disadvantageous position for the negotiation you are talking about. What you are talking about works well in a basic economics text book but does not translate to the real world.

The cleaning lady at SpaceX doesn't do a better job than that at Walmart. So why should she be paid more?

You think she's doing the heavy lifting there? Creating the billions? While the underperformer at VideoBuster / Radio Shack is responsible for tanking the business? That's just not true.

Finally, the case for exploitation! So brave to say people who do physical labor deserve less.

There's lots of physical labor jobs that pay more. It's all about doing something others can't.

> There's lots of physical labor jobs that pay more.

More than a billion?

... Let's keep things in perspective here.

I didn't say that. You misunderstood me. Read again.

You are saying that, you just value physical labor so little you no longer recognize it. Read again.

If you think they were commenting on physical labor your reading comprehension is poor. The example job could have been a “non physical” job, say the hallway CCTV monitor, and made the same point.

Their point is that labor they consider low impact or menial doesn’t drive returns, and therefore shouldn’t share in the returns. You’re right that the labor being physical is incidental, really they’re just classist/elitist and any job they consider beneath them would fit this model, while others wouldn’t. There’s a reason they chose a cleaner (and a woman!) instead of a product manager or CPA, though the quality is also unlikely to differ between spaceX and Walmart there.

Speaking of reading comprehension, they didn’t address the core argument of the person they were responding to, which is that labor that falls “beneath the fold” of this class line is not able to negotiate aggressively due to the inelastic costs of food, shelter, and basic necessities. It doesn’t matter how “high impact” you are, if you’re negotiating and need to eat you’ll accept any amount that lets you eat.

In fact, having impact or driving revenue is never the most important factor to reaping the rewards. Anyone who’s worked for a few years with their eyes open should reach this conclusion unless they have some strong motivation not to.

> which is that labor that falls “beneath the fold” of this class line is not able to negotiate aggressively due to the inelastic costs of food, shelter, and basic necessities.

Not to mention the U.S. encourages organization of the capitalist class while breaking up (often by force) organization of the working class, so any attempt at the working class gaining leverage in this negotiation is artificially limited.

Watch out, an AI bro is about to tell you you can’t read!

i'm not sure what this has to do with anything i just said

Since you've put in effort, I will return to doing so, too. But note that your ad-hominem attacks only reflect on yourself and don't strengthen your argument at all.

My point was simply that some work isn't essential to the business. Be that a cleaning lady, a corporate lawyer, or a CPA. They perform interchangeable work they could perform in the exact same way for a different company.

One obvious problem is that you can't scope the parents of success: Should the utility company get more money for supplying SpaceX than for Walmart? Should the municipal firefighter lady who stands ready for SpaceX share the spoils, should the husband who cares for their kids at home? Who knows.

Second, and you have ignored that, should they also share the defeat? If a company tanks, should we not pay the CPA who worked for that company? Because that's what happens to stocks who are worthless. If you argue the cleaning lady is responsible for success, she is responsible for failure also.

As an aside, I chose a cleaning lady because it's a relatable job. I don't even know what a CPA is but I guess it's an acronym that only makes sense in the US. See, that's what I wanted to avoid. Also it's easier to see how that is detached from the success of the core business, as you're familiar with the work (I presume you clean at home? But don't CPA at home, and don't lawyer at home.) The interchangeable work also works with corporate lawyers performing standard work, but it's not immediately obvious and harder to argue.

> slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis

Well there you have it folks case closed.

Slavery is illegal therefore there is no slavery. Geniuses at work indeed

PG thinks racism was solved in the 60s

And we all lived happily ever after in our frictionless world of spherical cows.

The fact that everything is consensual doesn’t mean the rewards are earned. If I find gold on my land and dig it up and sell it, I haven’t done anything wrong, but I haven’t earned most of that money. I just got lucky.

> If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation.

What if they were ? That's the whole point of the conversation lol. It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse. Maybe the company should be obligated to redistribute it to her employees, or to the public, etc.

... and to you, right?

Would you want to take a pay cut if your employer was having financial problems? Why not? Because you have an agreement on what your salary should be. It is fair that it works both ways.

> Would you want to take a pay cut if your employer was having financial problems?

This happens constantly in the form of layoffs…

Would you prefer to stay and work without pay and not be allowed to change jobs? Millions of people have also had that experience in countries without a free labor market.

Just because it could be worse doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

Uh, pay cuts due to financial problems of the business happens all the time.

> That's the whole point of the conversation lol

> It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse.

No, they addressed that with:

> The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.

Which would be truly immoral.

"lol"

That doesn't address anything, this is a vacuous statement, it's not even about negotation with the employer/employee, but with the public and everyone, you make the law whatever you want and they become consensual, either agree to the terms or you're not allowed to operate a business here, all consensual. This is how taxation and other regulation work. You're free to operate a business in another country if you don't like it, same as an employee is free to look for work elsehwere.

If I pay a plumber to fix a pipe in my house, and the value of my house is assessed now to be higher, I neither owe the plumber any more than the agreed rate for the pipe fix service nor equity in the house. If I owned 100% (or 20% per your company example) before, then I still own 100%. If the plumber was already a shareholder, then he will reap the additional reward.

Any asset value can grow or shrink thanks to effects from people, such as paid services, but I don't lose equity on property/companies I don't own if I vandalize them, just like I don't gain equity when I raise their value somehow.

Employees of a company are just contracted service providers with longer duration contracts, and of the company is public, they are free to buy some of that risk and gain or lose more when the company does so. 20% of $100B is $20B, so there is no need for a debate, math has our back.

Why do you think ownership should be uncapped and allowed to capture majority of wealth?

PG is absolutely right, if you want to be a billionaire, you need accelerated growth, you need to find something that a large number of people will pay for and you need to make sure you own equity into it as it grows, equity that grows with it.

And that's exactly the source of the debate, this trick to billionaire-level wealth, is that a good thing? Because it wasn't earned through labor, no one can earn a billion dollar through labor, you can only accumulate it through vast equity into market capture of a large market.

Wealth isn't tied to labor though. It is tied to ownership of assets and the value of those assets as defined by economic pressures such as supply and demand. Money (not to be confused with wealth) is an asset that is conveniently fluid, a good medium for trade, since if I have bread, you have eggs, and our friend has milk, but none of us line up perfectly for a trade with each other, we can use money as that asset exchange so all three of us can end up with the amount of eggs, milk, and bread that we decide of our own volition is the best distribution for us, competitively.

If your chickens reproduce because of the bread I provided you, your wealth in assets increases if the value of chickens and eggs don't go down at the same rate. We already traded our money and bread. If I wanted stake in your chickens, we could've came with an agreement (if you are willing to share your assets and risk), and I could then demand a share of your gain or loss. Otherwise it is theft.

Regarding employees, labor has never been tied to wealth. An employee provides a service, which is traded based on the supply and demand of that service, and money (not wealth) is the standard asset people prefer. Some people are paid in a different asset, such as share of the company or a combo of both. That is their wealth. Labor is independent if you decide to trade something else, and it is always a gamble, because values of any two different assets (including money) grow and shrink independently.

Compulsory profit-sharing seems like it might have some unexpected downstream effects. I think we already see some fairly creative book-keeping in industries where there's utility in reducing your company's apparent profit. The loopholes are many and the regulatory burden of identifying and closing them all is significant.

And there's no guarantee my base pay would stay the same if profit-sharing become the law of the land-- it doesn't seem improbable that my base might decrease in this new economic landscape. Suddenly, part of my income waxes and wanes according to strategic decisions that I don't get to play a part in, according to market forces that I can't fully predict. My life overall becomes more volatile.

I'm not against voluntary profit-sharing. The company I work for now does it, after <x> number of years of employment. I just suspect a blanket mandate would come with some baggage.

For sure, we'd need to be careful about implementation. Maybe we can't come up with a good version and decide not to do it.

But we should at least be able to discuss the problem.

Some people seem to think it's totally fine for wealth accumulation to be effectively uncapped, and for ownership to keep concentrating gains no matter how large the numbers get.

Past some point, that seems hard to justify.

so many people missing the point...

try to get out of the box

No it’s a magical startup where it’s just going to be her in a basement doing 100% of the work required for 10 months straight while demand doubles every month.

Not giving everyone equal % is exploitation?

Interesting, by that logic every participant in the economy should also be required to bail out any startup that fails otherwise we’re exploiting the founders! They’re taking all the risk and we’re getting all the benefit of the services and goods they create!

Well yeah? We should have really wide safety nets actually, so people can try startups and feel comfortable that they might fail. What kind of losses are you envisioning - is it just salaries?

Some have argued American bankruptcy laws is a contributing factor to how many companies get founded, more than most/all other counties in the world.

It may not be exploitation, but one can question how fair is the exchange rate of risk to reward and whether answering "free market" makes the question go away.

Let’s not be silly. If there are 10 people each with 10% and the company grows by 93%, then everybody’s shares, including the founder’s, grows by 93%.

I mean they have a point if you account for issuing new shares.

Yeah math is wrong. She has to wait one more month to be a billionaire since she has a co-founder. So 10 months.

The good news is she can be a trillionaire in another 10 months.