> So under socialism when people work, they work always and only for themselves or as part of a cooperative that they are an equal owner of. I don't see how th

> So under socialism when people work, they work always and only for themselves or as part of a cooperative that they are an equal owner of. I don't see how this is possible without killing or even reversing progress. Example: You work alone and make $500k a year. You know that if you had another good developer you could make a million a year. You know a lot of developers who currently make $100k a year. What is a fair pay? You might say $500k, sure, now both of you earn the same. But, then you realize that you can earn $1200k in total with yet another developer, what should you pay that developer then? $200k? Seems unfair, now he earns less than the first developer even though they do exactly the same job. Do you reduce the salary of the first developer to $350k to make it fair for both? I doubt many workers would think that reducing salary just to hire people is a good thing. Also you yourself would still earn $150k more than them, so would you reduce your own salary to $400k to make it fair? Then why would you even do the work to hire these people? Would they be happier to be stuck with $100k a year when you could easily pay them both $150k a year while still keeping significant profit? Would the world be better off with the 3 of you producing $700k total value (your $500k + their $100k each) instead of $1200k that you would produce together at your company? Ultimately, the only reasonable thing to do is to hire people at what their job is worth for a typical company or slightly above that. Any value above that is not created by the worker but by the work creator. Then they are happy since you pay them more than they got before, you are happy since you earn money for the work of providing valuable jobs. As a bonus you never get into situations where you would like to hire a person, the person would like to work for you but you can't pay him the same as the rest of your workers since those workers are significantly overpaid compared to the rest of the market.