Yes. If you work for 10 years and then just consume stuff for the rest of your life without lifting a finger, stuff for which other people work all day long to produce it while at the same time probably not enjoying a quality of life anywhere near yours, that is deeply unjust and I consider it immoral to desire such a life.
I would have paid double my taxes over my career if the US would spend it on elevating the poor. But asking me to not retire, to give away my savings to very few people? What, that’s not ethical.
What if I made a lot, but spend very little? Shouldn’t that weigh in, if your issue is consumption level?
What if in my early retirement, I go around lifting people up in non-monetary ways?
What if my job earned me a lot of money but was ultimately doing something I found socially harmful? I should continue working to the detriment of my mental health and against my principles?
We can elevate the poorest and decrease the amount of work the median/average person must do.
My point is very simple and we do not have to discuss all the edge cases. Working x hours and consuming stuff that took y hours to produce where y is much larger than x is unjust. All the rest are details.
I make widgets. I work 8 hours and make 8 widgets. In my spare time I make a machine to make widgets for me.
I've finished my machine, and it can make 16 widgets in 8 hours as long as I turn the crank. So I sit and turn the crank for 8 hours a day and make 16 widgets. Am I immoral yet? I just doubled my productivity for the same amount of work.
Now I pay someone to turn the crank for me. They work 8 hours and I give them 8 widgets, and I keep the other 8. They are doing the same 8 hours of work that I was doing, and I do nothing but make sure they keep turning the crank.
Am I immoral now? Why? I built the machine and I get 8 widgets a day out of it, the same amount I got when I was building them by hand. The crank turner also gets 8 widgets in 8 hours, the same amount I was producing by hand.
So the crank turner does less work for the same output, I do no work for the same output. But both of us have the same resources as my competitor who makes 8 widgets by hand.
Is it moral for the crank turner to exchange their 8 widgets for his? What about me?
How am I controlling others? They are willingly turning the crank. They still get 8 widgets and they do less work than if they built the widgets themselves.
Everyone is doing better in this scenario than when I was building the widgets alone.
How bizarre it is to have strongly prescriptive opinions about other people's time-value preference, and then to mistake those opinions for moral principles.
I wonder where the limits are though. What if I save up and take a month off? Is that immoral? What about 6 months? A year? Or do I have to have some justification for it that you find acceptable (like having kids or mental health, etc?)
Or is it just immoral to not be constantly working while other people are working?
To a first approximation, you work for one hour, you get to consume stuff that requires one hour of work to produce. I don't care if you work your ass off for some time and then retire early or if you work very little or very much as long as your consume at most a proportional amount.
Come on, people have written thousands of pages about economy over centuries, I wrote a few sentences here. Of course there are differences between working conditions, individual abilities, and whatnot, that is why I wrote to a first approximation. You are not really expecting that I say something about every possible aspect and edge case in the comments here?
Let us justify why some high ranking managers deserve to retire wealthy after a couple of years while their employees at the factory floor have to work for the rest of their lives while never coming close to the wealth of their higher management.
I might be wrong, but is the labour theory of work not supposed to explain how value works in the economy and is criticised for not making the right predictions? I am not saying that this is how the economy works, I am saying that this is how it should work, that it would be fair to exchange an hour of work for an hour of work. Whether this is actually realizable, is another question, because there is more to prices than the amount of work spent.
You should not be able to do that, the system should discourage it. But I think one likely has to tolerate this to some extent because trying to completely eliminate it will probably negatively affect people that rightfully claim such benefits, for example having to constantly prove that they are eligible.
That is your idea, my idea here is that it is immoral to pay insane amounts of money to keep promoting inequality which in some cases, as flying jet planes, also involves having more power to dismantle the planet we all live in.