alt Hacker NewsThese 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.
Your employees are not barred from and often do get a piece of that speculation if they receive shares or choose to buy them. If they aren't willing to buy stock in the company they work for then how does that square with the idea that they should in some other way own more of the profit the company produces? i.e. if they choose to only put in the required labour in exchange for pay what claim do they have on that secondary market when they haven't participated in it?
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?