alt Hacker NewsYou can't individually do enough work to do much of anything we take for granted in our modern era but you can design and build systems, mechanical and social, to do that work. A corporation is such a system often put in motion and helmed by a single person for a significant portion of its existence. It accumulates many people and a lot of capital along the way by means of exchange, cash for goods and services rendered, physical capital in exchange for cash or debt and people's work in exchange for wages. Those people don't own the corporation unless they are given or purchase stock in it. They have already been paid for their input. Expecting otherwise is like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
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> but you can design
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".
These people get wealthy by making a pyramid-shaped apparatus that funnels the actual productive output of their employees up to them.
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.