Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
> Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
They are, however, deeply important to the transaction.
1. Not being forced to work in the cobalt mines, I suspect.
2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out.
1. You didn't answer the question. You said what they wouldn't be doing. What would they be doing that would be making them happier?
2. You didn't answer this question either. What specifically is stopping them from opting out? Who is putting a gun to their head and saying they can't live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or be a subsistence farmer?
The answer is nothing. People are largely making these choices themselves, because they're better options, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's read a bit of history.
Um, the police will put a gun to your head if you're homeless. To not be homeless you can build on your land or someone else's land. If you build on someone else's land the police puts a gun to your head. To own land you need to participate in the system, and then after a whole lifetime working the cobalt mines the system might just let you get a section of property by the time you die if you're lucky.
> There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share...
Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact.
What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand.
> The disparity is insane right now though
The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions.
Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor.
In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want.
Exactly, thank you. I can't believe how many people like this there are on a forum that's ostensibly about startups, but I suppose HN has long since stopped being about startups now.
That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
> When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion.
> The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology
The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
> What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing.
but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact.
> Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc.
Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
Ah yes, people working for money, often more than they could make in other jobs in the local economy, is now slavery or concentration camp level conditions. I wish people here would actually live in a second or third world country before saying things like this from the comfort of their air conditioned house.
Before the chokepoint capitalist: you go to a store and pay $20 for an average-quality product. The value chain benefits by getting $20, you benefit by getting the product. Mutual exchange of value.
After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value.
This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah?
Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.
Every time my mom comes to visit me, she insists on going to the store to buy things just like she always did. There are plenty of stores. In most cases, these brick-and-mortar stores have significantly fewer options than online stores, for obvious reasons -- because they're physical and have limited space. The online stores are often competitively priced, often cheaper, even with shipping, because they have the benefit of scale. I can get an incredible amount of high-quality goods off Amazon at blazing speeds, often the same day, without having to leave my desk, drive my car, burn any fuel, or clog any roads. It provides tons of value.
Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.
I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.
I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft.
Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment?