Unit2Sucks said:
blungld said:
To hear these people talk, it is as they believe there are magical entrepreneur people who are special and better than everyone else and the only ones who actually think and work and who must be rewarded in such disproportion or they will stop providing for us all, maybe even become like the poor lazy dumb people. It's not only offensive, it's so obviously amoral and self-serving. Just crocks all around for the "don't notice that I am stealing from you as I accuse you of stealing from me" crowd.
Honestly, there are magical entrepreneur people that are special and better at generating wealth than others. I've seen plenty of companies that wouldn't succeed without the disproportionate impact of their founder and it does lead to wealth for many. There are a few famous examples (Apple, Tesla) but there are plenty of less heralded businesses where the same is true.
This isn't to say that these people don't need the government to provide a skilled workforce and infrastructure, but it's silly to believe that without special entrepreneurs that everything will just be fine. Most people (myself included) are not job creators and I do worry that the backlash to what is currently a system that is clearly out of whack might do too much to discourage job creators. We need a balance between corrupt oligarchy and regressive socialism.
I don't quite know how to articulate a response. Yes, of course there are attributes that are exceptional in certain people that translate to leadership and innovation...but there are a lot more of these people than one would conclude when looking at the results of our society.
For every person who "succeeds" as an entrepreneur there are many more who do not. The reason for this isn't necessarily because they were better. There are so many factors that come into play, not the least of which is luck and that the market can only bear so many "successes." So while they are special, they are not as special as their compensation would/should indicate, or nearly as special as they themselves think they are (and then the resulting self-deification). Gladwell does a lot of cool writing on this subject.
Additionally, I think we can all agree that the ability to create a business doesn't mean that you are more special as human being than someone who can't (and maybe since so many of these capitalist republicans are pro-life, you'd think they would be pro-supporting life after birth too).
And I think we can also agree that even if they were more "special" in every sense of the word, that still does not mean that they should be compensated to the point where it is destructive to other people, and to the point where it is destructive to them as well. Being so wealthy that you no longer have any touch with "reality" messes people up. So we are in effect destroying our special people by turning them into freaks and moving them to extreme positions outside of our society. It is important for them to be connected and not isolated if they are going to create value for the whole.
But my biggest contention is that the argument that these people "deserve" what they get (and so hands off world) and that their role as "job creator" mandates extreme compensation (what they are allegedly worth) is entirely faulty.
1) This is too esoteric to go into in great detail, but money has no inherent value. It is a social conceptual agreement. It is from the start a social contract. The "deserving" is not inherent to any activity, it is only deserving unto the social contract that assigns value to things. So getting what one deserves always should reflect back to a consideration of your role in the social. I am not expressing this well, but there is no objective vale to your ownership of gold say, or selling stocks, it only has value in a market that is created by humans to have an economic system that works for a society. That system doesn't work when wealth is so unevenly distributed and therefore it is undeserving by the standard of a social contract. You "deserve" what fairly compensates you to play a role in the society for that society's greater good.
2) The ability to create jobs is great. Go ahead and get rich doing it, but don't make the BS argument that because you create jobs (you didn't actually create them by yourself by the way) there should be no limit to how much you earn. How many of those jobs are actually just part of the support network to give you more worth? Is this a pyramid scheme? What is your formula for each job created (deserve = X amount of compensation for each job created)? If there were such a formula, how many people would still be far far far exceeding the value of the jobs they have created? And, again, they didn't create them by themselves and they have already most likely been compensated for that job creation within the enterprise itself.
3) I entirely reject the thesis that if the job creators are not made wealthy there will be no incentive for them to make jobs. Most job creators are driven by either ego or an obsession with an idea. Gates didn't create Microsoft because of tax policy or estimated wealth, and if he knew he would never make a dime he would have still made Microsoft. The arguments for the need for mega-wealth are false arguments used to justify the inequality after the fact. They are not in fact the reason there are entrepreneurs. The wealth motivation actually more describes middle management and bean counters who are profit driven and do not have original thoughts. Greedy people who do not care about inequality will argue for inequality because they want to be rich, not because they think jobs will not be created and innovation will not be created--the people who make these arguments never would have created any way--they are in it for themself. Greed is not good. And greed is self interest, part of which is to convince other people that being greedy is actually good for the other people.
4) Any person who steps away from from working hard because he will "only" make 100 million instead of 200 million, is a sociopath and there are thousands who would step in and take their place to compete for that 100 million. Society doesn't lose if that person is only in it for the money. Again, the "
they deserve it" argument is an after the fact rationalization and not in fact a description of the necessary condition for entrepreneurs, capitalism, and job creation, and no excuse not to tax and redistribute for the public good.We can be a thriving economy, with innovation and job creation and rich people and still have a strong social connection with one another that limits inequality and provides education and health care for all. We need to stop believing the made up dichotomy that we have to choose between having really rich people who trickle down enough to us all that we should be grateful or else we will have red socialist bread lines of communist government control. The conversation needs to be turned around, it is the rich who need to feel shame about having too much and not caring for their fellow man, not the poor who need to feel shame for being "losers" in our society.
"The Bear will not quilt, the Bear will not dye!"
