[csallen]

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.

[ceejayoz]

> 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.

[csallen]

> 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.

Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions?

1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier?

2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?

[ceejayoz]

> What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?

I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.

[esarbe]

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.

[csallen]

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.

[greedo]

Are you familiar at all with how China has "encouraged" people from farming communities to work in factories?

[csallen]

And this wouldn't be happening if Apple didn't exist? This is a problem created by capitalist companies, not authoritarian communist governments?

[esarbe]

1. Maybe living as hunter-gatherers would make them happier.

2. You can't live as a hunter-gatherers because the land has been enclosed and privatized.

There's no choice involved here. Your - and my - freedoms have been taken away a long time ago.

[inigyou]

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.

[esarbe]

Very well put, thank you.

[satvikpendem]

They are working for money, often in jobs paying more than others in their local economy, when they otherwise wouldn't be.

[lkjdsklf]

It’s still exploitative.

The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top.

There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world.

But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth.

I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though.

[csallen]

> 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.

[satvikpendem]

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.

[Noumenon72]

I'm genuinely curious whether HN's political turn represents generational turnover or a small group of vocal agitators. The anti-car faction I can safely say is the latter, the anti-billionaire people I'm not sure about.

[lkjdsklf]

The entire reason I disagree with the way wealth is shared is because I workedi n startups for years.

I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work.

[lkjdsklf]

> Why should they pay more than market worth?

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.

[csallen]

> 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.

This system doesn't work because what people consider to be fair is completely subjective and arbitrary, and of course under a system like that, people with less money are going to just tell people with more money to give it to them. The only actual fair way to decide prices and wages is to let the market decide.

If you truly think that, based on your arbitrary, subjective, personal opinions, that founders should be sharing more wealth with employees, and that the market's pricing is unethically low, then what number would you choose? How do you choose that number exactly? What makes your choice for that number any better than anyone else's choice for that number?

And why don't you apply that thinking to other analogous walks of life, like charity, or taxes? How much of your income do you give to those less fortunate than you in this great project we call our country, or to people in other areas of the world? If you think our taxes are too low, how much extra tax do you pay voluntarily? What number is appropriate? At what point is it unethical?

There are plenty of billions of people who don't live in the first world who consider even a lower-class American to be living a luxurious, privileged life. America is a country built off the back of exploiting other countries. Are lower-class Americans not therefore unethical unless they donate much more to their even less fortunate counterparts in second- and third-world countries?

I don't think we're ever going to agree here, because a central part of your subjective opinion about what counts as ethical behavior is related to how much money/wealth/stuff some other other person has. Whereas that doesn't factor into my ethical belief system at all. At no point in my life have I ever cared how successful anyone else is, let alone wanted to tear them down or blame my problems on their success, nor expected them to give their money away to others according to my personal belief system.

It continues to boggle my mind that people care so much about others' success. It's almost the exact opposite of the teachings of pretty much every religion or book of wisdom ever created.

> The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history.

This is an unprovable claim, an extreme claim, and almost certainly a false claim. It's also extremely subjective and depends entirely upon what metrics you choose to follow, most of which haven't been tracked for very long.

Worse, in my opinion, is that it's a popular a meme of an idea spread by politicians engaging in demagoguery, which has succeeded in getting people riled up in anger against their fellow citizens, as all demagoguery does. People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.

I can't tell you how many people I met in San Francisco who believed wholeheartedly that the city should be taking more money from more people, but couldn't recount a single fact about how the city stewards and spends its budget.

> That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another time 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.

I agree with you about the real questions, but I disagree that the other question is important. I agree with you about the latter questions, but I disagree that the former question is unimportant. In the US, we have an entire generation of people on both the left and the right side of the political aisle who are being brainwashed into believing that things were so much better in the past, for two very different reasons. And it's causing us to blame and distrust social and economic mechanisms that have benefitted millions to an unimaginable degree.

We live in an era of unprecedented wealth creation, technological progress, extreme poverty elimination, and quality of life improvements, and people are literally clamoring to tear it all down because they keep being told that it used to be better. It's important to understand that no, it didn't. Your actual quality of life, the thing that mattered, would not have been better in the past, for the vast majority.

But again, I do agree with you that we should try to make tomorrow even better. The focus should be more on allowing more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us.

I just don't see the focus being directed that way. I see far more people discussing how to tear down the rich than how to help the poor. Far, far, far, far, far more people. There's a strong and popular perception that somehow doing the former will lead to the latter.

> 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).

I don't know what to say to this. By historical standards throughout all of human history, almost every human who ever existed would pretty much agree with me that the differences you point out are trivialities. If you zoom in on incremental 1% improvements, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, designer brands, and things like that, sure, maybe Bill Gates has a lot you don't. I'm sure he's eaten some fancy cheeseburger that you haven't. Maybe he's been in some exclusive room that you haven't. But if this is the level of inequality that we're complaining about, minuscule and artificial differences that would require an education in luxury goods/experiences to even notice, then I don't know what to tell you. How is that not a HUGE victory?

> Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.

What a disingenuous statistic! The only reason the middle class in America has shrunk is because the upper class has grown! We are literally moving in an upward direction, creating more and more wealth to more and more people!

It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.

[ceejayoz]

Arbeit macht frei!

[satvikpendem]

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.

[ceejayoz]

Slavery would still be slavery if you got paid $0.01/day, so there's clearly some kind of threshold we all have for "good, fairly compensated work".

[satvikpendem]

If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much a dollar is worth elsewhere in the world, because purchasing power parity exists. It's like me being mad that on a hypothetical Mars people make a million dollars a day, that does not affect me whatsoever.

[inigyou]

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?

[stouset]

This is the key insight.

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.

[csallen]

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.