14 ms·

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people postin

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

dang 6y ago
I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- throwaway09223 6y ago
  Yes, sorry. I started browsing HN on a new device a few weeks ago and I made a new account because I didn't have access to my other system at the time.
  - dang 6y ago
    Appreciated!
- pgayed 6y ago
  Implement the email spam solution that never was: set a nontrivial fee to create a (posting) account on hn. 10 bucks oughtta do the trick.
  - dang 6y ago
    It's important to HN that anyone be able to participate. We pay a heavy price for that in spammers and trolls, but the benefit still exceeds the cost.
- anoncow 6y ago
  How did you know? From the username?
  - vondur 6y ago
    Probably via the IP address used.
- wakeywakeywakey 6y ago
  You could consider implementing a generic 'throwaway' account that anyone can use, since these are not expected to have continuity of discussion or identity. Or, this could be a flag on accounts or sessions.
curun1r 6y ago
I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what you pay them to do it. And you have to do that at scale. So Jeff Bezos has figured out how to pay people $X and make $X $Y off their labor, pocket a significant portion of that $Y and do it for the hundreds of thousands of people that work for Amazon. Nowhere in this argument is anyone saying that this practice should not be allowed or that he’s done something wrong. But what people are saying is that the narrative that billionaires built their wealth themselves is false and that they should be taxed heavily in recognition of the fact that they built their wealth off of the work of others. The billionaires Paul identifies and helps create are no different, other than the possible exception that they rely on market’s expectation of future exploitation of workers’ value rather than having actually done it already. Paul would never fund a founder who wanted to divide all profits among employees. Therefore, based on that single fact alone, he is identifying future billionaires based on their willingness to exploit their workers...to pay them less than the value of their work.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Great post! Agree 100%
- UK-Al05 6y ago
  This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where profit comes from(assuming a well functioning market) in a modern economics point of view, look into Subjective theory of value and marginal economics.
  - postingpals 6y ago
RIMR 6y ago
No, it's absolutely a strawman. The exploitation billionaires create isn't direct. The problem is that Billionaires amass this wealth while people beneath them struggle. Jeff Bezos shouldn't be making 12-figure gains while his warehouse workers are on welfare. Those warehouse workers shouldn't be paying a higher tax rate than he does on their income. That IS an unquestionably exploitive relationship between a CEO and his employees, even if he isn't personally being an exploitive monster he isn't doing anything about the systemic exploitation he lead the way in creating. This is pretty much true of any billionaire, regardless of their personality or views. The existence of billionaires is a economic luxury that should only be afforded once society as a whole has taken care of its people. The co-existence of billionaires and homelessness is an economic failure, especially when some billionaires possess more capital individually than the entire homeless population of this country.
- eschaton 6y ago
  And if, say, Jeff Bezos hired his warehouse workers as employees, paid them an inflation-adjusted minimum wage (eg about $25/hr), and offered real benefits, he and his company would still be making massive profits. That’s what makes it unethical and exploitative: They don’t actually need to be paid so little or treated so harshly for the company’s economics to work!
  - jackcosgrove 6y ago
    Henry Ford paid his workers shockingly high wages for the time, which enabled them to purchase the cars they built. A mass consumer economy ensued. Given the state of consumer indebtedness now, I think our economy is actually underperforming because there is not enough demand due to low wages. The problem with Fordism is that if you are a manager, there are strong incentives for your firm to defect from paying high wages. If you are the only firm doing this, the consumer economy still hums and you have larger margins. If all the firms do this however, consumers' spending power diminishes over time. Once the tide has turned, defection becomes a matter of survival as high wage firms become uncompetitive. Someone like Jeff Bezos has enough market power and technology to turn the tide again like Henry Ford. But he chooses not to.
zd123 6y ago
Lets assume it is not a strawman, what empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case? I mean, as an example, billionaires have access to top notch lawyers that lower their tax bill, look at Trump’s recent tax filings for example. Can you reasonably argue that they are not unfairly taking advantage of society, and by extension its people? What about government lobbying etc. I mean the list goes on. Personally I think PG just attacks the weakest form of the argument against his view. He obviously benefits from billionaires being created as he is an investor. Getting a large payout is literally the purpose of his job.
- q-big 6y ago
  > I mean, as an example, billionaires have access to top notch lawyers that lower their tax bill, look at Trump’s recent tax filings for example. Can you reasonably argue that they are not unfairly taking advantage of society, and by extension its people? One can reasonably argue that laws were passed which give rich people this advantage.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mistermann 6y ago
I disagree. PG's statement: > The second is about something politicians sometimes say — that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people — and why this is mistaken. He is framing it so he is debunking an absurd claim: that the only way (no other ways are possible) to become a billionaire is by exploiting people. This is distinctly different from whether "exploiting people" (opinions vary on what this means) is the most common way it is actually done. It's a shame we don't have a political party that would end this rhetorical he said / she said approach we take to this topic, and instead adapt a thorough data focused approach to this problem, accurately illustrating the situation in a way that the common man could understand. It would be nice to know with some level of accuracy how "bad" the problem really is, as it is we have little to go on other than our intuitions and propaganda from both sides.
- Miraste 6y ago
  Data isn't sexy, data doesn't sell. The "common man" neither cares about real numbers nor has the education and ability to interpret them, even in very simplified graphical form. Look at the percentage of people who can answer extremely basic questions about charts and be horrified: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/ https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/
  - mistermann 6y ago
    So far, but has anyone ever given them something worth taking seriously? How wide of a variety of approaches have we tried? Ross Perot did all right, and he was a total amateur. If a group of people actually put some serious though and effort into it, who knows what might be possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_c... In the 1992 election, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, about 19,741,065 votes, but no electoral college votes, making him the most successful third-party presidential candidate in terms of the popular vote since Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.[46] Unlike Perot, however, other third-party candidates since Roosevelt won multiple electoral college votes: Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968. Compared with Thurmond and Wallace, who polled very strongly in a small number of states, Perot's vote was more evenly spread across the country. Perot managed to finish second in two states: In Maine, Perot received 30.44% of the vote to Bush's 30.39% (Clinton won with 38.77%); in Utah, Perot received 27.34% of the vote to Clinton's 24.65% (Bush won with 43.36%). Although Perot did not win a state, he received a plurality of votes in some counties.[47][48] His popular vote total is still by far the most ever garnered for a third-party candidate, almost double the previous record set by Wallace in 1968. A detailed analysis of voting demographics revealed that Perot's support drew heavily from across the political spectrum, with 20% of his votes coming from self-described liberals, 27% from self-described conservatives, and 53% coming from self-described moderates. Economically, however, the majority of Perot voters (57%) were middle class, earning between $15,000 and $49,000 annually, with the bulk of the remainder drawing from the upper-middle class (29% earning more than $50,000 annually).[49] Exit polls also showed that 38% of Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Bush, and 38% would have voted for Clinton.[50] Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler," post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome.[51]

dang 6y ago

I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

throwaway09223 6y ago
Yes, sorry. I started browsing HN on a new device a few weeks ago and I made a new account because I didn't have access to my other system at the time.
- dang 6y ago
  Appreciated!
pgayed 6y ago
Implement the email spam solution that never was: set a nontrivial fee to create a (posting) account on hn. 10 bucks oughtta do the trick.
- dang 6y ago
  It's important to HN that anyone be able to participate. We pay a heavy price for that in spammers and trolls, but the benefit still exceeds the cost.
anoncow 6y ago
How did you know? From the username?
- vondur 6y ago
  Probably via the IP address used.
wakeywakeywakey 6y ago
You could consider implementing a generic 'throwaway' account that anyone can use, since these are not expected to have continuity of discussion or identity. Or, this could be a flag on accounts or sessions.

curun1r 6y ago

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what you pay them to do it. And you have to do that at scale. So Jeff Bezos has figured out how to pay people $X and make $X $Y off their labor, pocket a significant portion of that $Y and do it for the hundreds of thousands of people that work for Amazon. Nowhere in this argument is anyone saying that this practice should not be allowed or that he’s done something wrong. But what people are saying is that the narrative that billionaires built their wealth themselves is false and that they should be taxed heavily in recognition of the fact that they built their wealth off of the work of others. The billionaires Paul identifies and helps create are no different, other than the possible exception that they rely on market’s expectation of future exploitation of workers’ value rather than having actually done it already. Paul would never fund a founder who wanted to divide all profits among employees. Therefore, based on that single fact alone, he is identifying future billionaires based on their willingness to exploit their workers...to pay them less than the value of their work.

abhinav22 6y ago
Great post! Agree 100%
UK-Al05 6y ago
This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where profit comes from(assuming a well functioning market) in a modern economics point of view, look into Subjective theory of value and marginal economics.
- postingpals 6y ago

RIMR 6y ago

No, it's absolutely a strawman. The exploitation billionaires create isn't direct. The problem is that Billionaires amass this wealth while people beneath them struggle. Jeff Bezos shouldn't be making 12-figure gains while his warehouse workers are on welfare. Those warehouse workers shouldn't be paying a higher tax rate than he does on their income. That IS an unquestionably exploitive relationship between a CEO and his employees, even if he isn't personally being an exploitive monster he isn't doing anything about the systemic exploitation he lead the way in creating. This is pretty much true of any billionaire, regardless of their personality or views. The existence of billionaires is a economic luxury that should only be afforded once society as a whole has taken care of its people. The co-existence of billionaires and homelessness is an economic failure, especially when some billionaires possess more capital individually than the entire homeless population of this country.

eschaton 6y ago
And if, say, Jeff Bezos hired his warehouse workers as employees, paid them an inflation-adjusted minimum wage (eg about $25/hr), and offered real benefits, he and his company would still be making massive profits. That’s what makes it unethical and exploitative: They don’t actually need to be paid so little or treated so harshly for the company’s economics to work!
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Henry Ford paid his workers shockingly high wages for the time, which enabled them to purchase the cars they built. A mass consumer economy ensued. Given the state of consumer indebtedness now, I think our economy is actually underperforming because there is not enough demand due to low wages. The problem with Fordism is that if you are a manager, there are strong incentives for your firm to defect from paying high wages. If you are the only firm doing this, the consumer economy still hums and you have larger margins. If all the firms do this however, consumers' spending power diminishes over time. Once the tide has turned, defection becomes a matter of survival as high wage firms become uncompetitive. Someone like Jeff Bezos has enough market power and technology to turn the tide again like Henry Ford. But he chooses not to.

zd123 6y ago

Lets assume it is not a strawman, what empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case? I mean, as an example, billionaires have access to top notch lawyers that lower their tax bill, look at Trump’s recent tax filings for example. Can you reasonably argue that they are not unfairly taking advantage of society, and by extension its people? What about government lobbying etc. I mean the list goes on. Personally I think PG just attacks the weakest form of the argument against his view. He obviously benefits from billionaires being created as he is an investor. Getting a large payout is literally the purpose of his job.

q-big 6y ago
> I mean, as an example, billionaires have access to top notch lawyers that lower their tax bill, look at Trump’s recent tax filings for example. Can you reasonably argue that they are not unfairly taking advantage of society, and by extension its people? One can reasonably argue that laws were passed which give rich people this advantage.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mistermann 6y ago

I disagree. PG's statement: > The second is about something politicians sometimes say — that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people — and why this is mistaken. He is framing it so he is debunking an absurd claim: that the only way (no other ways are possible) to become a billionaire is by exploiting people. This is distinctly different from whether "exploiting people" (opinions vary on what this means) is the most common way it is actually done. It's a shame we don't have a political party that would end this rhetorical he said / she said approach we take to this topic, and instead adapt a thorough data focused approach to this problem, accurately illustrating the situation in a way that the common man could understand. It would be nice to know with some level of accuracy how "bad" the problem really is, as it is we have little to go on other than our intuitions and propaganda from both sides.

Miraste 6y ago
Data isn't sexy, data doesn't sell. The "common man" neither cares about real numbers nor has the education and ability to interpret them, even in very simplified graphical form. Look at the percentage of people who can answer extremely basic questions about charts and be horrified: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/ https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/
- mistermann 6y ago
  So far, but has anyone ever given them something worth taking seriously? How wide of a variety of approaches have we tried? Ross Perot did all right, and he was a total amateur. If a group of people actually put some serious though and effort into it, who knows what might be possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_c... In the 1992 election, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, about 19,741,065 votes, but no electoral college votes, making him the most successful third-party presidential candidate in terms of the popular vote since Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.[46] Unlike Perot, however, other third-party candidates since Roosevelt won multiple electoral college votes: Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968. Compared with Thurmond and Wallace, who polled very strongly in a small number of states, Perot's vote was more evenly spread across the country. Perot managed to finish second in two states: In Maine, Perot received 30.44% of the vote to Bush's 30.39% (Clinton won with 38.77%); in Utah, Perot received 27.34% of the vote to Clinton's 24.65% (Bush won with 43.36%). Although Perot did not win a state, he received a plurality of votes in some counties.[47][48] His popular vote total is still by far the most ever garnered for a third-party candidate, almost double the previous record set by Wallace in 1968. A detailed analysis of voting demographics revealed that Perot's support drew heavily from across the political spectrum, with 20% of his votes coming from self-described liberals, 27% from self-described conservatives, and 53% coming from self-described moderates. Economically, however, the majority of Perot voters (57%) were middle class, earning between $15,000 and $49,000 annually, with the bulk of the remainder drawing from the upper-middle class (29% earning more than $50,000 annually).[49] Exit polls also showed that 38% of Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Bush, and 38% would have voted for Clinton.[50] Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler," post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome.[51]