You’re kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I’m all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
Not really. Workers are dropped before the owner loses out. The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost. Certainly not for mega corporations, where the owner who took the original risk is often long gone. It’s now run by MBAs who’s only skill is increasing shareholder value at the expense of all else.
The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost.
This isn’t even quite true because even established companies can fail after taking additional (or even by not doing so), but you’re basically arguing “once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!” Of course if you discount the risk people take, there is no risk.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is a big imbalance now and laborers are generally getting screwed. But there is a reason I decided to take the path of becoming a skilled laborer instead of s business owner: I don’t want to take that risk.
I can and do easily jump from one job to another, with little worry at all.
once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!”
No, that’s a strawman. The risk is far reduced, not zero. To get to zero, you have to be Too Big To Fail and have the government bail you out.
The reduction in risk is obvious when you see how layoffs work. The CEO gets a big bonus for walking a whole lot of people out the door.
Libertarian types want to start with stories about farmers selling corn by the side of the road, and then expect you to believe the argument still holds when scaled up to Fortune 500s.
You’re nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesn’t change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and “risks” 30% of it starting a business. Let’s say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he “risked” a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. It’s a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos “built Amazon” with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents could’ve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isn’t how it played out is because parents don’t like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their “right mind” would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You can’t “shield” yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that “rich people are financially more secure so it’s easier for them to take risk” I 100% agree. There’s no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize “the uterine lottery.”
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the “risk” taken by people just being paid to do labor. Don’t get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didn’t invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. It’s just that this isn’t infinite and doesn’t mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly “well, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!”
It’s not, and this is specifically why I’ve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. It’s easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, it’s not that it’s “easier” for rich people, it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there’s no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What’s the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it’s a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist’s profit, it’s always theft.
We need to incentivize risking capital
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn’t function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It’s a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn’t be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don’t find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor;
Except this isn’t true. You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral. Is it easier for rich people? Yes, we both agree it is.
But the risk does not get “demoted” to the working class. The working class did not take a risk (again, all generally speaking, I hope I don’t have to keep repeating that). They applied for a job, someone offered them money for their labor, and they accepted. If the job disappears, they’ve lost nothing. They can go apply for another job and have another person pay them for their labor. At the end of the day, the worst they can be is back to zero.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question. If one does not benefit from risking their capital, then you are simply going to see fewer, if anyone, actually risking their capitol. I’m trying to argue within what I believe to be the frame of reality: someone has to take the risk and I think the only way to incentivize that is to reward them disproportionately for doing so. Is the current balance off? Absolutely, we both agree on that.
Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
You’re using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people. It’s not theft if you and I agree that you’ll do something and I’ll pay you for it. It’s not exploitation, in and of itself, if you and I both agree upon the terms of our relationship, but I benefit more from it financially.
It’s a fundamentally broken system.
In theory every pure system works, in practice none of them does. Certainly, capitalism is no exception. But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best. I’m not some anachro-capitalists, it’s clear that we need to socialize things, and I think healthcare is one of the most obvious that falls into that system, and it is also obvious that labor should have a larger share of the pie. But this idea that everything breaks because of capitalism, seems to be the opposite of what is most often the reality.
But I feel like we are getting off the point. What the meme is about is how labor is “risking” something because they can lose their job and end up back at zero. It’s simply not comparable to a capitalist with their potential of actually losing money.
You’re kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I’m all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
Not really. Workers are dropped before the owner loses out. The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost. Certainly not for mega corporations, where the owner who took the original risk is often long gone. It’s now run by MBAs who’s only skill is increasing shareholder value at the expense of all else.
This isn’t even quite true because even established companies can fail after taking additional (or even by not doing so), but you’re basically arguing “once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!” Of course if you discount the risk people take, there is no risk.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is a big imbalance now and laborers are generally getting screwed. But there is a reason I decided to take the path of becoming a skilled laborer instead of s business owner: I don’t want to take that risk.
I can and do easily jump from one job to another, with little worry at all.
No, that’s a strawman. The risk is far reduced, not zero. To get to zero, you have to be Too Big To Fail and have the government bail you out.
The reduction in risk is obvious when you see how layoffs work. The CEO gets a big bonus for walking a whole lot of people out the door.
Libertarian types want to start with stories about farmers selling corn by the side of the road, and then expect you to believe the argument still holds when scaled up to Fortune 500s.
You’re nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesn’t change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
And you’re completely missing the point that this argument doesn’t scale.
I don’t even know what that means. Zero risk is zero risk.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and “risks” 30% of it starting a business. Let’s say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he “risked” a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. It’s a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos “built Amazon” with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents could’ve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isn’t how it played out is because parents don’t like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their “right mind” would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
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Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You can’t “shield” yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that “rich people are financially more secure so it’s easier for them to take risk” I 100% agree. There’s no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize “the uterine lottery.”
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the “risk” taken by people just being paid to do labor. Don’t get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didn’t invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. It’s just that this isn’t infinite and doesn’t mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly “well, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!”
It’s not, and this is specifically why I’ve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. It’s easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, it’s not that it’s “easier” for rich people, it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there’s no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What’s the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it’s a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist’s profit, it’s always theft.
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn’t function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It’s a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn’t be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don’t find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
Except this isn’t true. You can go and find investors, or get a loan if you are willing/capable of putting up something as collateral. Is it easier for rich people? Yes, we both agree it is.
But the risk does not get “demoted” to the working class. The working class did not take a risk (again, all generally speaking, I hope I don’t have to keep repeating that). They applied for a job, someone offered them money for their labor, and they accepted. If the job disappears, they’ve lost nothing. They can go apply for another job and have another person pay them for their labor. At the end of the day, the worst they can be is back to zero.
While someone who puts millions of dollars into starting a business or expanding one can lose all of that money, and be net negative one million dollars. Might this not hurt them much because they have a lot? Sure. But they were the ones who took the risk.
What is justified is kind of besides the point, because that is a subjective question. If one does not benefit from risking their capital, then you are simply going to see fewer, if anyone, actually risking their capitol. I’m trying to argue within what I believe to be the frame of reality: someone has to take the risk and I think the only way to incentivize that is to reward them disproportionately for doing so. Is the current balance off? Absolutely, we both agree on that.
You’re using too strong of words that is just going to turn off many rational people. It’s not theft if you and I agree that you’ll do something and I’ll pay you for it. It’s not exploitation, in and of itself, if you and I both agree upon the terms of our relationship, but I benefit more from it financially.
In theory every pure system works, in practice none of them does. Certainly, capitalism is no exception. But from just looking around, it seems to me that as a starting point, capitalism is unquestionably the best. I’m not some anachro-capitalists, it’s clear that we need to socialize things, and I think healthcare is one of the most obvious that falls into that system, and it is also obvious that labor should have a larger share of the pie. But this idea that everything breaks because of capitalism, seems to be the opposite of what is most often the reality.
But I feel like we are getting off the point. What the meme is about is how labor is “risking” something because they can lose their job and end up back at zero. It’s simply not comparable to a capitalist with their potential of actually losing money.