[georgebarnett]

Take it from the workers?

Are you suggesting that workers do not have employment contracts where they agreed to trade labour for wages at a fixed price?

Workers always have the choice to take the risk of starting their own company for higher potential earnings.

[smolder]

It's mainly people with generational wealth and robust safety nets that have the choice to take a risk for higher potential earnings. For most workers the risk just is too big, the odds of success too low, based not on their merit but their runway to screw up/burn money. To the extent it's true that "you gotta fail to succeed", you need to be able to afford failure, to succeed.

[georgebarnett]

This is a rediculous assertion.

To begin, you know nothing of the circumstances of millions of people. Certainly not enough to make sweeping statements.

In 2023, there were 5.5 MILLION new businesses started in the USA. Do those people all have generational wealth? of course not.

The reality is it’s easy to start a business but very hard to succeed.

[JoeAltmaier]

Generational wealth can be just, an intact family that has savings. Borrow from the folks, start a coffee shop.

It is simple - so simple that 5.5 millions of Americans can use their family money to do it. That doesn't preclude there being 360M Americans that don't start a business, because they don't have family money.

Sweeping statements on both sides I think.

[cinntaile]

Starting another plumbing business is very unlikely to net you a billion dollars. To achieve that you need to bet on riskier businesses, they are more likely to fail. If your parents are well off you can afford to fail a few times by betting big. Most still won't succeed but it doesn't affect them that much because they're insulated from the downside risk due to well-off parents.

My point isn't really that people from well-off families are more likely to start a family, although that probably is true as well. My point is that people coming from a regular background are more likely to start less riskier businesses, less chance of failure but also less chance of reaching a billion dollars.

[smolder]

I tried to throw in some words like "mainly, most" to leave room for the many exceptions to my generalization, but perhaps it was a bit strongly worded. Even so, the point stands that people need a fall back plan to feel comfortable taking risks. I often hear business leaders patting themselves on the back for taking big risks, but leaving it unsaid that they had no real chance of losing everything. Risk tolerance enables risk taking.

[georgebarnett]

Again I disagree on cost. I just had a look again at what it costs to buy a company off the shelf in the UK (last place I did that). It’s about £299 and another £50 a year. Theres probably some other small change fees in there.

I completely agree on risk though and it highlights the core of the argument - building a business is time consuming and risky in a way that being an employee is not.

That’s one reason why business owners are able to capture more profit. They took more risk and placed themselves into a situation where their earnings are not bounded by a single contract.

Everybody has free will and could start a business but not everybody is capable due to skill, capacity, circumstance, etc.

Therein lies the irony. None of the people whining loudest will start a company because it’s risky and fraught with danger but they want all the spoils of ownership and responsibility.

[sapphicsnail]

Not everyone has access to the amount of capital needed to start a business or the savings to support them while they grow that business. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. Those people will never have the same bargaining power as their employers.

[meowfly]

Op is correct though. A CEO of a major US company who makes 1000x the wage of a factory owner in Shanghai who makes 100x the wage on the back of illegal migrant labor (very common) who is working to send money home to support their parents in the rural city they were born.

Just a few decades ago, that CEO would have paid his fellow countryman a modest salary and would have also made less themselves.

When you just imagine the staggering gap we've created, it feels deeply unfair. And it's not just a matter of starting a business. It is a structural moral failing.

[georgebarnett]

If the worker in Shanghai had similar economic freedom and rights to workers in the west have then this would not be an issue.

Instead, useful idiots everywhere are proposing to add restrictions to the parts of the system working well.

[meowfly]

> If the worker in Shanghai had similar economic freedom and rights to workers in the west have then this would not be an issue.

You're right. So I guess we are agreeing that the hyper-capitalist system we currently have relies on exploiting others?

We can build a system with less sharp edges without blowing it up.

Like worker representation on boards (Germany does this), cap gains that reduces as you hold investments (Clayton Christensen proposal), and holding the countries we outsource to similar environmental and labor standards.

[giraffe_lady]

Profit is surplus value created by the labor of workers. I'm simply saying no one works hard enough to create a billion dollars worth of anything.

Wealth accruing to owners rather than the workers who produce it is older than employment contracts. I'm pointing out that this arrangement is the result of a set of choices that have been made, and we could choose otherwise. The fact that we consider this one approach correct and fair and not others is not inevitable.

[throwaway11460]

A) Profit is not necessarily connected to any workers, this is industrial revolution-era economics straight from the 19th century, modern world is different. Today I can create intellectual property and keep copying it until forever - without a single worker in sight.

B) These workers are free to work on their own - why don't they form their own company or become self employed?

[georgebarnett]

Your overly abstract language has no value here.

Profit is not surplus value created by worker - that’s a 4 year olds understanding and negates all the other components of the system of which labour is only one.

We have tried “choosing” various “arrangements” (or more correctly, competing economic systems) and evidence points to capitalism being the correct approach to maximise liberty, growth and progress.