Comment by WalterBright
14 hours ago
> Why should society care about people making profits?
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
14 hours ago
> Why should society care about people making profits?
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service.
I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.
Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town that has a store.
The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.
> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.
That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.
Your argument amounts to billionaire apologism and has nothing to do with my comment.
If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.
> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.
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Name one CEO of a large company who fits your profile.
Elon Musk is a great example. These days, he mostly writes racist tweets, pretends to play video games, consolidates his own businesses to increase his own apparent net worth, and undermines the federal government.
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No, the real people providing the food, shelter and electronics are the generally the lowest paid in society.
But they are making a profit. Otherwise they'd have to stop providing stuff, because they'd be broke.
Nope. They're the ones making those more expensive, via collusion, rent-seeking, monopoly capture, and lots of other ways.
Well I am still waiting for my google home and my meta steaks.
Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another.
Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.
> Reality is, those companies don't give anything back
California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state.
Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs.
The tax was rescinded.