Memes

I don’t really have a direct reply to these ideas but I would like to point out an interesting example of a business model that addresses some of these concerns, that is the worker cooperative, where the workers have some portion of ownership of the company, either in revenue sharing or decision making.

If your net worth breaks a billion dollars, you will garner this sort of criticism nearly no matter what you do with it. Bill Gates, at least recently, has been just about as close as you can be to a model philanthropist, and people still spit on his name regularly.

A few things that help though, would be A) paying workers higher than the federally mandated minimum amount that you can legally pay them without running afoul of labor laws, B) Reinvesting profit back into the company instead of paying yourself a gorillion dollar yearly bonus while the rest of the employees get a 2.5% cost of living raise, and C) donating to charitable causes or human rights groups.

But some CEO's (I won't say many, but definitely some) do all of these things and still come under public fire. Realistically, if you actually manage to hoard enough money to become a billionaire, you've already abandoned your morals. No human being needs that much money. By all means profit from your innovations and rake in enough to live a comfortable life off them, but when your take home pay for a month is 12x what your next best paid employee makes in a year, you're a motherfucker. Doubly so, when said employee is the one with boots on the ground and all the CEO is doing is signing papers and looking pretty for the shareholders.

In my opinion, there should never, ever ever, be a discrepancy of more than 5x the amount your lowest paid employee makes. If you're paying people 25k a year to do the work that runs your business, the guy at the top of the chain of command shouldn't make more than 125k. If you pay your guys 100k a year, sure, take home 500k a year if you've got the profits. Live comfortably. But when a company makes record breaking profits, turns around and cans half their staff, then pays the bigwigs a million dollar bonus while everyone else gets next to nothing, yeah, fuck you, fuck your product, and fuck your shareholders. If you look around there's been quite a lot of that going on recently.

I guess my point is, the act of dishonestly hoarding the money in the first place is what makes us hate the rich. If you made that money fair and square and you deserve it, man, more power to you. I don't think anyone is upset with Dolly Parton even though she's worth an estimated 650 million US dollars, because she sweat and bled for that money and hasn't taken to lording it over everyone else just because she can. Bezos invented a website and then rode it's coattails into the realm of the obscenely rich without hardly ever lifting another finger for it. So did Musk. And the better-than-thou attitude they get about it makes it so much worse.

Not all the rich are bad people, but for the most part, good people don't become rich. Not like that. It takes a certain amount of gleefully taking advantage of your fellow humans to get there. That remorseless exploitation is what we hate.

The devil doesn't need more volunteer advocates, he's got plenty of paid ones.

Those philosophies are not the only way to do things. Workers don't have to be paid the minimum possible. At some point, wealth accumulation becomes so extreme that it's immoral, like when people have so much money that they could never possibly spend it and are spending $300 million on a new boat or whatever. Tax rates used to be much, much higher on wealthy people and they still were "reaping the benefit of their innovation". Even better than paying taxes would be giving the money to employees. Paying a janitor (not sure why that is your example of someone who is lesser) enough money to buy a house and pay for their children to go to college is not a waste. It's also how the economy works. Capitalists and the wealthy class in the US seem to think they can keep all the money and economically starve their employees without realizing that the public has to have enough money to buy their products.

If you're paying your employees what they're worth (not the minimum the market will bear, but actually in line with the value they contribute), and you're still making Bezos money, then you're fleecing your customers.

There's no way to get to a billion dollars without 1) exploiting your labor and supply chain by taking advantage of capitalist forces to pay less than the value of their contribution or 2) exploiting your customers by taking advantage of capitalist forces to charge more than the value of your product. Usually both, to extreme degrees, enabled by monopolies, regulatory capture, collusion, and other capitalist tricks. That's not "a business that helps people".

No matter how "innovative" an entrepreneur is, the actual value of their product or service is generated by the people who actual do the work. Of course, you're entitled to the value that you personally create, but the best business idea in the world is worth exactly zilch without implementation. Bezos doesn't build those fulfillment centers, he doesn't manufacture the products, he doesn't pack the boxes, he doesn't drive the trucks, he doesn't program the website. He only has the wealth he fits because he pays the people that generate the value of his company the absolute minimum that he can get away with, skimming a big slice of everyone's labor value for himself. That doesn't help the public.

There is no reason for any indivitual or rich group to own the means of production and steal the benefits a worker produces, fuck the "free" market!