5 ms·
If you run a company you understand that you're not the person creating the profit. If every worker vanished you'd make zero profit (in fact you'd probably lose
by pluma 8y ago
If you run a company you understand that you're not the person creating the profit. If every worker vanished you'd make zero profit (in fact you'd probably lose money because of static costs but depending on the scale you might still contribute some income to offset that).
Entrepreneurs don't create value, labor does. Entrepreneurs seed and lead organisations that direct labor towards profitable activities.
Bill Gates took a certain level of risk, yes. He also had a strong financial safety net and head start by sheer circumstance of his upbringing.
Unless every employee throughout the lifetime of Microsoft was compensated in actual proportion to their contribution to the overall profit of the company, Bill Gates didn't derive his wealth from his contributions but simply from those of his employees.
We have a cultural norm of hero worship but Bill Gates wouldn't be where he is if he had paid everyone their fair share. The reason we don't consider this is that we consider this to simply be how businesses operate.
- shaki-dora 8y agoI‘m just about as far to the left as an old radio set to 800Mhz, but it still seems foolish to choose Bill Gates as the specific hill to die on. As but one problem: Microsoft employees, especially the early ones, don’t strike me as particularly good examples of abject victims of capitalism.
- uxcolumbo 8y agoWhy is your post being down voted? Kinda makes sense, but the last bit regarding fair share is probably more complicated. Weren't the early employees at MS given stock options and many became millionaires? How should new employees who joined 10 years after MS's founding for example be fairly compensated (as they didn't contribute to reaching escape velocity)?
- manigandham 8y agoThat's not how capitalism works. It's all about the individual. The entrepreneur has ownership over the means of production, and the workers have ownership of their time. Of course everyone plays a part (and the leader definitely creates value unless you think companies run themselves) but workers are compensated under terms they agree to. What you're proposing is just socialism that takes away power from the individual. That never works. You have no way to judge what the fair share is or what contribution someone actually made and thinking that you know how to value someone's life better than they do is just attempting to place a moral to be morally better than they are. Also you might want to talk to the early employees of Microsoft who are millionaires, or any employees today who are highly paid with stock grants that give them a piece of the company, and most importantly talk to the billions of people who are living a little easier after the eradication of Polio thanks to the Gates Foundation.