[gen220]

> In selling his goods, does the man not capture value from his customers?

No, because selling goods is not the same thing as capturing value. Jesus is not asking for the man to first accrue wealth and then distribute it, he's asking the man to liquidate his wealth and distribute them. The implication is that the man developed his wealth through value capture.

> I don't mind that some of the $700 goes to paying the people that did create the phone. Both parties are left better off.

This unfortunately omits the many other parties involved in the supply chain, who are exploited and whose exploitation is carefully elided or hand-waved away by the phone vendor.

You're not exploiting them, though. Even the vendor has plausible deniability – because local governments have "different norms" around worker safety. And hey, they have money now that they didn't have before! So don't look too closely, OK?

You're a point of negative pressure (demand) in the system, that collectively keeps the whole system in balance. It's difficult to wrap our brains around and difficult to accept, which (IMO) makes its informed maintainers worse than a petty criminal.

Of course, capturing value through voluntary transactions does not necessarily rob the counterparty. But in today's complicated global economy, it's unfortunately insufficient to look at your transactions in isolation to know that you're not robbing somebody by proxy, or becoming an accessory to a robbery.

To put it in relief: is money laundering a violation of the golden rule, even if you capture no value from said laundering?

[hellojesus]

I don't think it was possible to investigate the entire supply chain even before the modern era. I go to a farmer and buy some crops, or barter with them. Who's to say they don't have slaves, or don't have good working conditions, etc.?

How does an economy work under your system? I must create demand somewhere. I need food. I need clothes. I need shelter. Amd I want things. Eventually I'll need to trade, and that trade will benefit both parties by making them both better off. But by becoming better off, some value was captured: I value what I purchase equal to or more that what I gave up. The concepts of marginal costs and revenue come into play here. Under your system, do I have to abstain from all trade if my marginal revenue exceeds my marginal cost? How do I scale?

[gen220]

> Who's to say they don't have slaves, or don't have good working conditions, etc.?

This is what social norms are for, and we have done it forever. The modern era has made this exponentially more difficult.

> Eventually I'll need to trade, and that trade will benefit both parties by making them both better off.

Yep yep, totally fine if you're not exploiting anybody.

> But by becoming better off, some value was captured: I value what I purchase equal to or more that what I gave up.

As long as you're creating value throughout the chain, you're doing just fine.

> Do I have to abstain from all trade if my marginal revenue exceeds my marginal cost?

This is actually an interesting question! The Luther piece touches on this a lot (where is the line between "Usury" and "Commerce"?). The answer he arrives on is no, you don't need to abstain, and that division of labor is not Usury.

The point is not to avoid profit, it's to avoid breaking the golden rule – there's no hard cutoff around how much profit is "too much" profit, but a rule of thumb that's often quoted (for whatever reason) is around 30% – i.e. if you see a gross profit that's consistently at or above that number, there's usually exploitation happening somewhere.

> How do I scale?

The answer depends on what we mean by scale. Revenues? Profits? Headcount? Volume of throughput?

[hellojesus]

Very interesting perspective. Thank you