[joquarky]

> I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B.

This hypothetical isn't possible. There's no way you can directly manage the construction of 20k houses in a human lifetime.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

In this example, someone has come up with a way to build houses $50k more efficient than someone else. Otherwise, they wouldn't be at a competitive price that includes a $50k *profit* per house. (profit = the price of efficiency).

So a person figuring out how to scale their homebuilding methodology by teaching others and providing the *capital* with which they can implement that methodology isn't worth anything to you? I can't imagine a society that could work without these features -- we'd all be re-learning best practices every generation because there'd be no incentive to scale up ideas that work.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

So if someone invents a cure for all cancer that costs $1 to make, and they sell it for $2, in your world the value created by the inventor is only the profit from the vaccines that person *personally* manufactures themself? That's an insane and backward world that I'm glad we don't live in.

[Zambyte]

Hot take but people should be paid for working instead of ripping off people with cancer because they got to call dibs on intellectual "property".

[rayiner]

They have places like that. It’s called my dad’s village in Bangladesh. The only way to make money is through labor, just like you want. But it turns out that, without capital, the only labor there is to do is farming rice.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

"Ripping people off"? I think you'd enjoy living in the Soviet Union which existed in exactly this kind of backwardness.