| It's a strawman argument for founders, but I am fairly sure it is made out of ignorance. Let's say a sole founder buys $100,000 worth of Amazon Cloud, Nvidia cards, smartphones etc. Yes, one person is at the company, but others made those goods. The founder may not have directly exploited the person who made the smartphone they're using, but someone did. Also, let's say I sell my small company which is well positioned in a fast growing market. The buyers are not buying based on what happened before, but on the future work and revenues that will be acquired from people working on the product. At the end of the day there are people who work and create wealth and get a wage or salary, and there are idle class heir LPs who do not work or create wealth. The heirs survive on the wealth created in expropriated, unpaid surplus labor time of workers who do work. VCs front for the LPs, and founders deal with the VCs. I don't think Graham even knows what he is arguing with. I'm not trying to make a convincing argument for the other side, but a clarifying one. Incidentally, pretty much every economist up until the mid 19th century agreed with my view in some form - Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo - all the people who made economic arguments which economists still use. They said they studied political economy. It wasn't until the 1870s that arguments against new value being created by labor were started in full swing, although some of the ideas go back to the 1830s. |