My profile[0] has a quote about Marx and Smith hitting on the same idea, and this piece is a good illustration of that. We have two competing sentiments - that

My profile[0] has a quote about Marx and Smith hitting on the same idea, and this piece is a good illustration of that. We have two competing sentiments - that workers are exploited by capitalists for the value they provide via their labor, and that the overall efficiency of an economy is dependent on people working in their own self interest. I think the problem we face is not how best to redistribute wealth, but how to align these two sentiments instead of creating an adversarial relationship between labor and entrepreneur. And I think Marx was right - workers should own the means of production. However, the historical methods to achieve this have been overwhelmingly inefficient and usually enforced at the point of a gun. That's a mistake. Meanwhile, in capitalist economies, joint ownership enterprises rose up and the cost of automation came down. Anyone can now buy a share of Apple stock for a day's wage[1], and carry around one of their super computers for a week's wage[2]. The real problem is one of culture. The Luddites had enough organization to mount frontal assaults on the textile mills that threatened them, so why couldn't they pool their resources and start their own mills? Today, we encourage young people to take on loads of debt to go to college, ensuring they leave college subject to the whims of capitalists. The sentiment is right: it makes sense to encourage young people to carve out a living for themselves early in life. But the cultural method of achieving this makes no sense. It would make more sense to encourage young people to take minimum wage jobs when they turn 15 and investing every spare dime that they have - thus giving themselves a basic income early in life. The article suggests minimum wages, public pension funds, and higher taxes on business is the answer. I think it's absurd to penalize the most efficient, most product parts of an economy for being more efficient and more productive. If coercive redistribution is something we deem necessary as a society, then we should be redistributing ownership of our most profitable corporations to those who are least able to fend for themselves. An equity tax that takes shares of APPL from Tim Cook and gives them to people on food stamps. That way, marginal increases in productivity are not disincentivized by tax policy, and laborers who now own the means of production are no longer exploited, but rather rewarded in tandem with the entrepreneur. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 [2]https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7