| Income is a combination of two main factors: 1. The value you add to the economic 'stream' flowing around you 2. The amount you're able to divert out of that and into your own control These are influenced by a number of secondary factors: 1. Starting capital to buy tools and resources to increase your ability to contribute 2. The ability to help others increase their contributions, or less charitably, the ability to take credit for the contributions of others 3. A willingness or unwillingness to pillage the commons A humble farmer can work some acres of land, use his mind to know what best to grow, use his hands to make it happen, trust the sun and rain to grow the crops, and sell the harvest for a value greater than the cost to lease the land and buy the seed. With a million-dollar combine, cultivators, spreaders, center-pivot irrigation systems, an all the other features of modern agriculture, he can reap a much greater - more valuable - harvest. But when a dealership has negotiated exclusive rights over a region, and the salesmen take a non-negotiable commission of sales, does the salesman who connects the farmer to the combine he knows he needs deserve thousands of dollars for closing that sale, just because he's situated himself between the farmer and the manufacturer? When Wall Street or Jane Street sees that our massive farm industry needs massive numbers of combines - it's a $500B industry - and they're able to siphon off a percent of that industry's output for "providing liquidity" just because their Daddy knows some people, while the farmer's Daddy worked 18-hour-days every harvest season until he died, and the former is a multimillionaire by age 30 while the latter might make $200k during 4 of 5 seasons and lose $300k in a bad year...it just doesn't feel right. |
This is an important point. As we've pushed the limits of our natural resources, and woken up to the externalized costs of some of our ways of creating value (i.e. respiratory disease from fossil fuel based energy), this is increasingly going to require us to re-evaluate how we define 'value' added to the economic stream.
> But when a dealership has negotiated exclusive rights over a region, and the salesmen take a non-negotiable commission of sales, does the salesman who connects the farmer to the combine he knows he needs deserve thousands of dollars for closing that sale, just because he's situated himself between the farmer and the manufacturer?
I'm not arguing for any value added by middle-men in your example, but sales people provide a service that many of us "maker" types don't want to deal with, which is to engage "socially" with potential customers. Selling and buying an expensive product or service is often a social act. That social act has a value in some spaces.