[tomrod]

The common argument would be that, unless you set it up as a co-op/full profit share or never hire employees, you're extracting value (exploiting) from what your employees' labor earned the company.

Missing from both sides of this argument, IMHO, is BATNA.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

[jstummbillig]

So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition? We presume that people at large would be ready say "Oh yeah, in that case: You earned that billion dollars for sure, nothing wrong with any of that, go you"?

Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?

Because if that is the depiction we are going with: I have my doubts.

[tomrod]

Reasonable thoughts. Folks have been arguing about this forever. Both sides - community-focused and individual-focused -- have reasonable points on the ethics and morals of what they claim. Both sides want claim to a split of the pie produced by the efforts of individuals.

Just like you're mentioning Obama's lambasted "you didn't build that" comments -- his point was completely valid, in that the individual profiteers didn't build the roads their products ship on, the energy infrastructure their cloud providers consume to host their digital footprint and logistics, etc. etc. But people pay for a large part of what they DO consume -- the cases where they don't are what we squirrelly and bookish economists call "externalities" (costs of production gotten too cheap/free). Trying to correct for every externality is a maddening and endogenous exercise in navel gazing -- but huge and easily seen externalities are not crazy to want to address (e.g., Erin Brokovich, pollution, etc.).

In your example of someone getting hired to field support tickets -- if that person weren't hired, the founders would spend all their time chasing down those tickets. So did the founder earn the cash, or did both people earn the cash despite one of the jobs being less favorable? If an egalitarian share is unwarranted, what is a reasonably fair trade? Why is an egalitarian share unwarranted? Etc.

The core question embedded in all these arguments are - what is a fair tax on the economy? If a government's policy encourages large economic growth for everyone, then perhaps it is good to fund it via tax with all the associated tradeoffs like crowding out, marginal decisions impacted, and so on. Getting it right looks like Scandinavia. Getting it wrong looks like Cuba / final days of the USSR. Ignoring it (on both sides of the aisle) looks like Venezuela and Argentina.

But there is no doubt that without the people who produce there would be no taxes, and a 100% tax would push everyone away from doing anything. This is why the way-too-simplistic Laffer curve argument seemed compelling in the 80s -- "unshackle the economy by lowering taxes."

I haven't kept up with pg (fairly or unfairly) since some of the techbrokings adopted Yarvinism as a goal, so I have no idea what he has said recently.

[inigyou]

I thought the problem with Cuba was it being embargoed because the USA is jealous it didn't get some profits several decades ago.

[tomrod]

This is one of their many issues, yes. They also have many bright sides that aren't covered in my <250 word response and miniscule relevant paranthetical aside.

[well_ackshually]

>So if one finds a way to do it and not hire people they actually earned the money by that definition?

That's the fun part: they cannot make a billion dollars through their own work. It doesn't exist. Billions of dollars do not exist without either collaboration (extremely rare), or exploitation of others (see: every single YC company)

>Whereas: If they hire a single employee to help with, idk, responding to support tickets that would get them into "well maybe you did not earn it"-territory?

Would you have made that billion without the employee ? If not, you did not earn it. Would your company have gone under if you didn't have someone handling those support tickets, what percentage of the survival of the company is linked to it, and why didn't you pay them nearly that percentage ? Congratulations on exploiting your employee.

[lkjdsklf]

Do you have any examples of a singe company with only the founder as an employee that is worth a billion dollars?

Her point was being made about actual reality and not some hypothetical fantasy

[tomrod]

To be fair, reality is a special case (and not always the most interesting one) of general principles.

With recent advances in AI, it may be possible for someone to build a billion dollar single founder company.

[lkjdsklf]

No.

Reality is reality. Her statement was based on reality.

Inventing some nonexistent fantasy where her statement is wrong isn’t a useful exercise.

Yes, it’s possible that in the future there may be some person that manages do be worth billions by themselves, but that doesn’t exist today so isn’t relevant to her statement

[tomrod]

I appreciate you would really like people to agree with you here, but you've made your argument cage wrapped so tight you fail to recognize the people just outside who support a lot of where you want to be.

Working through a world where some condition proves true is useful to inform logical policy. It admittedly doesn't make for a sexy soundbite and is a lot harder to work through, but it has substantial use (1) to both justify the morality of a policy/action in the real world and (2) to anticipate a potential real world scenario where a single person makes a billion dollars in a SaaS.

Just because pg is `not even wrong` doesn't mean we have to be as well.

[demorro]

> To be fair, reality is a special case

Thank you, you made me laugh in earnest. This is one of the funniest things I've read today.