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I wasn't sure if you were moving the goalposts through your first five paragraphs, but paragraph six confirmed it: In my hypothetical, the employer owns the sho
by euroclydon 11y ago
I wasn't sure if you were moving the goalposts through your first five paragraphs, but paragraph six confirmed it: In my hypothetical, the employer owns the shovel. In yours it's the worker.
If you own your own tools that you use for work, you're probably an independent entity like a contractor, not an employee. You seem to confirm this at the end of paragraph six with the example of a homeowner hiring twenty shovel laborers -- surely this homeowner does not intend them as FTEs.
- logfromblammo 11y agoThe shovel doesn't care who owns it. If the employer owns it, the employee gets paid less because the shovel rental is effectively deducted from his pay. If the worker owns it, the end consumer can (theoretically) pay less, because the worker does not need to pay any rent on his tools. The purchase cost of a better shovel is a barrier to entry, not a marginal cost of production. By the time you get up to giant mechanized excavators, the barrier is so high that a guy with just a spade and a dream can never get that far, because anyone either renting or owning a better tool can outcompete him at every turn, and the rent on a better shovel may be such a large proportion of the cost of shoveling that the laborer using it could never accumulate enough savings to buy his own tool. That's where you have to rely on an external force to change the status quo, "force" being the key word. The guy who doesn't play nice gets metaphorically whacked in the head with a shovel. Taxes are just one of many ways to do that.
- euroclydon 11y agoIf the little guy gets a mechanized excavator, he's not so little any more. And wouldn't that be his goal anyhow? Why would anyone want to go through the trouble to buy one, if there were not a high barrier to entry?