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He as a human is worth exactly the same as the workers, of course. But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created. The others could create th

He as a human is worth exactly the same as the workers, of course. But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created. The others could create their own wealth, Bezos wasn't in a privileged position when he started. If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.

fattire 6y ago
"wealth he created"
- emteycz 6y ago
  Exactly. How else would it get to his bank account? If he didn't create it, why people sent it to him? He stole it?
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Profits are just unpaid wages. He bought labor for less than it was worth and pocketed the excess.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      That means the workers will have absolutely no problem founding their own business and there is no need to tax Bezos.
      - jamiltron 6y ago
        That's not what that means at all. Founding a business requires a significant investment of capital.
        emteycz 6y ago
        It doesn't necessarily require the founder investing large amounts, Bezos began with a small investment - and a lot of ingenuity. My own business began this year with $0 and I'm way past $100k. I had to live in my car for two months, absolutely worth it though, it helped me focus like never before. I created excellent product and then spent a lot of time both online and offline finding customers. And now imagine you do this, and after all the shit you went through people start saying you don't deserve your money, completely ignoring the huge risk you made and the opportunity cost behind you, and that YOU MADE THE THING. What would you think?
        jamiltron 6y ago
        "A small investment" and the ability to take on risk sounds like a significantly privileged position the average worker is not afforded.
        emteycz 6y ago
        Every single worker with a wage is more privileged than me - I had zero, no job, no house, and debt. Them not being able to take risks is just bullshit, they're simply afraid or don't even want to - and that is alright, people like me will happily employ them - unless employing or being in the state becomes too risky.
        jamiltron 6y ago
        And I'm glad you're privileged enough to be here posting today, boasting of the wealth your workers generate for you :-)
        sdfin 6y ago
        How do you define "privilege"? Isn't it another way of saying "wealth"?
        jamiltron 6y ago
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - xtian 6y ago
      Not quite - he paid a wage to labor based on the current competition in the labor market and the cost of a worker to provide for his/her necessities. Then he sold the end product of the workers' collective labor for its value, determined by the sum of the value of all the labor that went into producing it. He pocketed the difference between the former and the latter. That's where profit comes from.
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        In either case, the workers produced more value than they were compensated for.
        xtian 6y ago
        Absolutely, and that's the only place profit can come from. The distinction between wage and value is important because it explains the inevitable tendency of capitalists to suppress wages and working conditions as competition drives increased automation. As the share of value that fixed capital contributes to the end product increases, the only way to maintain the same level of profit is to squeeze workers more.
        pashamur 6y ago
        The thing about this logic is it breaks down once you replace "workers" with robots (which companies of the future will).
        xtian 6y ago
        It doesn't break down. Machines have been replacing workers since the dawn of industrial capitalism. That's not a new or future development. The value that a machine imparts to its end product is equal to the portion of its total value which is used up in the process of production. Same with other forms of constant capital like tools and raw materials. So if a shirt machine costs $500 and can produce 1000 shirts before it wears out, then it imparts $0.50 of value to each shirt produced. When the end products are sold on the market, their price always covers the cost of replenishing the constant capital. Constant capital is merely "congealed labor" meaning that labor had to be performed to produce it in the first place. When workers utilize the constant capital they unlock that value and also impart the additional value of their labor to the final product. The sum of the value of this labor plus the value of the constant capital expended equals the total value of the end product. When this end product is sold on the market as a commodity, its exact price fluctuates based on supply and demand and other factors, but its center of gravity is always the amount of labor required to produce it and all its components at a given level of technology. Capitalists are the people who own the machines, tools, and raw materials. They pay workers a wage to utilize that constant capital and produce commodities for sale. This wage is determined by the conditions of competition in the labor market, but fundamentally it is anchored to how much it costs a worker to provide for his subsistence (e.g., food, clothing, shelter) and not the amount of value that his labor imparts to the commodities he helps produce. The difference between the value a worker's labor imparts and his wage is what the capitalist appropriates as private profit. The development of automation like the robots you mention is incentivized by market competition. Automation enables capitalists to produce more commodities with less labor. Any competitor who can't match the level of production is driven out of the market. But because automation reduces the amount of labor required, it also necessarily reduces the rate of profit on each commodity. Thus to maintain the previous level of profit, production must be increased and/or wages and labor conditions must be suppressed. Over time, at the scale of the whole economy, this leads to crisis as neither the capitalists nor the workers can consume all the commodities produced (the capitalists are too few and the workers' wages are insufficient by definition).
    - sdfin 6y ago
      Profit is the wage of the investor that assumes risk in his enterprise. No profit, no investment.
      - xtian 6y ago
        Profit comes from ownership, a wage comes from selling one's labor-power on the labor market. The only risk an investor assumes is of having to transition from the ownership class to selling his labor-power on the market if all his investments fail catastrophically. A worker assumes many more risks on a daily basis.
        sdfin 6y ago
        Why? If a worker loses his job, he also has to sell his labor-power on the market. But if the investor diversified well his investments, he's likely to have lower risk than an average worker. Ownership requires management and the steps which were required to achieve that ownership. Somebody maybe had to work hard to own, while others inherited.
        xtian 6y ago
        Yes an investor has lower risk than a worker. A worker depends on continually selling his labor-power to survive. He can't do that if he gets sick or injured, if he gets laid off, if his area of expertise gets automated out of existence, etc. When an investor makes an investment all he risks is maybe eventually having to become a worker (only a real potential for small investors and small business owners).
    - DINKDINK 6y ago
      So if you hire a plumber to fix your sink, you have to pay them with all of your life savings? Else, you'd have profits left over, right?
tsimionescu 6y ago
> But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created. I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him. Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others. Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit. > If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money. Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.
- hansvm 6y ago
  > His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's all in the realm of "numbers to big for our primate brains to comprehend" anyway, but Amazon as a whole only pulls in as much _revenue_ as 13 million warehouse workers, 14 thousand times less than you're implying. Beyond that, Amazon has over a million employees. Using a simplistic model of their contributions that Bezos is irreplaceable and each worker is fungible, you'd get Shapley values for the whole organization along the lines of Bezos getting half and the workers splitting the rest. In terms of profits before wages the workers are getting far more than half, and even in terms of revenue before expenses they're only getting a few times less than half. As a crude ballpark, compensation doesn't seem to be disproportionate. Valid counter-arguments include Shapley values not being an appropriate way to allocate payment (which necessitates choosing which one (or more) of their payout properties you'd like violated, e.g. symmetry among equivalent workers or that payment should depend on value added), my model being so simplistic that it can't possibly be right even to an order of magnitude, declaring that even a factor of 2 is actually important in examining Bezos's income, etc. Appealing to a gut reaction based on numbers that are "obviously" too big is misleading at best.
Can_Not 6y ago
> Bezos wasn't in a privileged position when he started. According to wikipedia: > He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon. I know literally zero people whose parents could afforded to have given this type of loan, let alone willing to.
- graderjs 6y ago
  If you're telling yourself, "the only difference between me and Bezos" is his "privilege", and "If I had that 300k I would do the same", I think you're missing out on how important his personal choices were, and your own. If you don't see the choice factor, I think two things happen: 1) you stay where you are because you think, nobody is in fact successful, they only had it given to them, and 2) and you think it doesn't matter what you do, so you will not navigate your path with choices, and see yourself as an agent, but instead see yourself as basically a helpless leaf in the current, tossed this way and that by fortune and fate. Personally, I feel it's really important to take personal responsibility for my own path, and see where I am as a result of choices. Not just for things like business, but for all of life. I think that's perspective puts me in a position of power, and taking that perspective is something I can control. Even in the context of things like harassment, or accidents, or childhood abuse and trauma, I don't think about it as, "I chose for this to be done to me," but rather as, "I choose what I make this mean, and I choose how I respond." I feel if I give that up that perspective, I willingly take on a disempowered perspective, so I see giving that up as giving myself a disadvantage. I understand if you and other people want to see things that way, and I myself have the reflex where if I see someone successful I immediately ask myself, "Yeah, but who did they know? Who gave that to them?" and I try to let go of that because I see that as a trap that will make me feel better (by comparatively telling myself, it wasn't my fault, I just didn't get so much given to me, and also by letting me bring down in my own estimation the significance of their success, and thereby their capability, by eroding its legitimacy, since it wasn't them, it was just what they got given) -- and I try to remember that such notions won't help me get anywhere. So I try to emphasize to myself how inspired I feel about this, as in, "I like this. How can I get some of that for myself?" One way I try to remember this to myself is, "If I can't get from where I am to where they started, how would I ever get from they started to where they go to?" And "win from any position". All the same, I'm not suggesting these are appropriate attitudes for you or others, since everyone has a different path and purpose, and we need a diversity of people who believe different things...but I just hope that sharing this, can give you some insight into the other perspectives that are out there about this. I know how hard it can be to hear even a simple set of ideas like this, because these ideas, if you entertain them run the risk of removing the comfortable distance you put between your own path, and those of others, by being able to explain it away as not having any responsibility yourself. It's a lot easier to psychologically deal with knowing about "people more 'successful' than me" if I can tell myself "it's not my fault" and even "they are not responsible for their success". Taking that responsibility, even just in a perspective sense, prompts you to look at where you are at, which can be very painful. It's not my intention to initiate this sort of response in you by sharing this, and it's not an attack on your position, just sharing my relationship to that kind of thinking, and how I understand it can be a very difficult type of thinking to try. I hope it was insightful and worth your time reading, but if not, at least you have the perspective you already know and like.

fattire 6y ago

"wealth he created"

emteycz 6y ago
Exactly. How else would it get to his bank account? If he didn't create it, why people sent it to him? He stole it?
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Profits are just unpaid wages. He bought labor for less than it was worth and pocketed the excess.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    That means the workers will have absolutely no problem founding their own business and there is no need to tax Bezos.
    - jamiltron 6y ago
      That's not what that means at all. Founding a business requires a significant investment of capital.
      - emteycz 6y ago
        It doesn't necessarily require the founder investing large amounts, Bezos began with a small investment - and a lot of ingenuity. My own business began this year with $0 and I'm way past $100k. I had to live in my car for two months, absolutely worth it though, it helped me focus like never before. I created excellent product and then spent a lot of time both online and offline finding customers. And now imagine you do this, and after all the shit you went through people start saying you don't deserve your money, completely ignoring the huge risk you made and the opportunity cost behind you, and that YOU MADE THE THING. What would you think?
        jamiltron 6y ago
        "A small investment" and the ability to take on risk sounds like a significantly privileged position the average worker is not afforded.
        emteycz 6y ago
        Every single worker with a wage is more privileged than me - I had zero, no job, no house, and debt. Them not being able to take risks is just bullshit, they're simply afraid or don't even want to - and that is alright, people like me will happily employ them - unless employing or being in the state becomes too risky.
        jamiltron 6y ago
        And I'm glad you're privileged enough to be here posting today, boasting of the wealth your workers generate for you :-)
        sdfin 6y ago
        How do you define "privilege"? Isn't it another way of saying "wealth"?
        jamiltron 6y ago
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - xtian 6y ago
    Not quite - he paid a wage to labor based on the current competition in the labor market and the cost of a worker to provide for his/her necessities. Then he sold the end product of the workers' collective labor for its value, determined by the sum of the value of all the labor that went into producing it. He pocketed the difference between the former and the latter. That's where profit comes from.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      In either case, the workers produced more value than they were compensated for.
      - xtian 6y ago
        Absolutely, and that's the only place profit can come from. The distinction between wage and value is important because it explains the inevitable tendency of capitalists to suppress wages and working conditions as competition drives increased automation. As the share of value that fixed capital contributes to the end product increases, the only way to maintain the same level of profit is to squeeze workers more.
      - pashamur 6y ago
        The thing about this logic is it breaks down once you replace "workers" with robots (which companies of the future will).
        xtian 6y ago
        It doesn't break down. Machines have been replacing workers since the dawn of industrial capitalism. That's not a new or future development. The value that a machine imparts to its end product is equal to the portion of its total value which is used up in the process of production. Same with other forms of constant capital like tools and raw materials. So if a shirt machine costs $500 and can produce 1000 shirts before it wears out, then it imparts $0.50 of value to each shirt produced. When the end products are sold on the market, their price always covers the cost of replenishing the constant capital. Constant capital is merely "congealed labor" meaning that labor had to be performed to produce it in the first place. When workers utilize the constant capital they unlock that value and also impart the additional value of their labor to the final product. The sum of the value of this labor plus the value of the constant capital expended equals the total value of the end product. When this end product is sold on the market as a commodity, its exact price fluctuates based on supply and demand and other factors, but its center of gravity is always the amount of labor required to produce it and all its components at a given level of technology. Capitalists are the people who own the machines, tools, and raw materials. They pay workers a wage to utilize that constant capital and produce commodities for sale. This wage is determined by the conditions of competition in the labor market, but fundamentally it is anchored to how much it costs a worker to provide for his subsistence (e.g., food, clothing, shelter) and not the amount of value that his labor imparts to the commodities he helps produce. The difference between the value a worker's labor imparts and his wage is what the capitalist appropriates as private profit. The development of automation like the robots you mention is incentivized by market competition. Automation enables capitalists to produce more commodities with less labor. Any competitor who can't match the level of production is driven out of the market. But because automation reduces the amount of labor required, it also necessarily reduces the rate of profit on each commodity. Thus to maintain the previous level of profit, production must be increased and/or wages and labor conditions must be suppressed. Over time, at the scale of the whole economy, this leads to crisis as neither the capitalists nor the workers can consume all the commodities produced (the capitalists are too few and the workers' wages are insufficient by definition).
  - sdfin 6y ago
    Profit is the wage of the investor that assumes risk in his enterprise. No profit, no investment.
    - xtian 6y ago
      Profit comes from ownership, a wage comes from selling one's labor-power on the labor market. The only risk an investor assumes is of having to transition from the ownership class to selling his labor-power on the market if all his investments fail catastrophically. A worker assumes many more risks on a daily basis.
      - sdfin 6y ago
        Why? If a worker loses his job, he also has to sell his labor-power on the market. But if the investor diversified well his investments, he's likely to have lower risk than an average worker. Ownership requires management and the steps which were required to achieve that ownership. Somebody maybe had to work hard to own, while others inherited.
        xtian 6y ago
        Yes an investor has lower risk than a worker. A worker depends on continually selling his labor-power to survive. He can't do that if he gets sick or injured, if he gets laid off, if his area of expertise gets automated out of existence, etc. When an investor makes an investment all he risks is maybe eventually having to become a worker (only a real potential for small investors and small business owners).
  - DINKDINK 6y ago
    So if you hire a plumber to fix your sink, you have to pay them with all of your life savings? Else, you'd have profits left over, right?

tsimionescu 6y ago

> But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created. I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him. Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others. Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit. > If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money. Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.

hansvm 6y ago
> His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's all in the realm of "numbers to big for our primate brains to comprehend" anyway, but Amazon as a whole only pulls in as much _revenue_ as 13 million warehouse workers, 14 thousand times less than you're implying. Beyond that, Amazon has over a million employees. Using a simplistic model of their contributions that Bezos is irreplaceable and each worker is fungible, you'd get Shapley values for the whole organization along the lines of Bezos getting half and the workers splitting the rest. In terms of profits before wages the workers are getting far more than half, and even in terms of revenue before expenses they're only getting a few times less than half. As a crude ballpark, compensation doesn't seem to be disproportionate. Valid counter-arguments include Shapley values not being an appropriate way to allocate payment (which necessitates choosing which one (or more) of their payout properties you'd like violated, e.g. symmetry among equivalent workers or that payment should depend on value added), my model being so simplistic that it can't possibly be right even to an order of magnitude, declaring that even a factor of 2 is actually important in examining Bezos's income, etc. Appealing to a gut reaction based on numbers that are "obviously" too big is misleading at best.

Can_Not 6y ago

> Bezos wasn't in a privileged position when he started. According to wikipedia: > He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon. I know literally zero people whose parents could afforded to have given this type of loan, let alone willing to.

graderjs 6y ago
If you're telling yourself, "the only difference between me and Bezos" is his "privilege", and "If I had that 300k I would do the same", I think you're missing out on how important his personal choices were, and your own. If you don't see the choice factor, I think two things happen: 1) you stay where you are because you think, nobody is in fact successful, they only had it given to them, and 2) and you think it doesn't matter what you do, so you will not navigate your path with choices, and see yourself as an agent, but instead see yourself as basically a helpless leaf in the current, tossed this way and that by fortune and fate. Personally, I feel it's really important to take personal responsibility for my own path, and see where I am as a result of choices. Not just for things like business, but for all of life. I think that's perspective puts me in a position of power, and taking that perspective is something I can control. Even in the context of things like harassment, or accidents, or childhood abuse and trauma, I don't think about it as, "I chose for this to be done to me," but rather as, "I choose what I make this mean, and I choose how I respond." I feel if I give that up that perspective, I willingly take on a disempowered perspective, so I see giving that up as giving myself a disadvantage. I understand if you and other people want to see things that way, and I myself have the reflex where if I see someone successful I immediately ask myself, "Yeah, but who did they know? Who gave that to them?" and I try to let go of that because I see that as a trap that will make me feel better (by comparatively telling myself, it wasn't my fault, I just didn't get so much given to me, and also by letting me bring down in my own estimation the significance of their success, and thereby their capability, by eroding its legitimacy, since it wasn't them, it was just what they got given) -- and I try to remember that such notions won't help me get anywhere. So I try to emphasize to myself how inspired I feel about this, as in, "I like this. How can I get some of that for myself?" One way I try to remember this to myself is, "If I can't get from where I am to where they started, how would I ever get from they started to where they go to?" And "win from any position". All the same, I'm not suggesting these are appropriate attitudes for you or others, since everyone has a different path and purpose, and we need a diversity of people who believe different things...but I just hope that sharing this, can give you some insight into the other perspectives that are out there about this. I know how hard it can be to hear even a simple set of ideas like this, because these ideas, if you entertain them run the risk of removing the comfortable distance you put between your own path, and those of others, by being able to explain it away as not having any responsibility yourself. It's a lot easier to psychologically deal with knowing about "people more 'successful' than me" if I can tell myself "it's not my fault" and even "they are not responsible for their success". Taking that responsibility, even just in a perspective sense, prompts you to look at where you are at, which can be very painful. It's not my intention to initiate this sort of response in you by sharing this, and it's not an attack on your position, just sharing my relationship to that kind of thinking, and how I understand it can be a very difficult type of thinking to try. I hope it was insightful and worth your time reading, but if not, at least you have the perspective you already know and like.