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Comment by zelos | Hacker News Reader

Because the value of the output of the person making CRUD apps is presumably worth more than $150k to their employer, right? If a company pays its employees more than the value of their output, they'll go out of business.

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I think this is tangential, but you're very correct! This alone makes you question the morality of capitalism. Your employer necessarily steals some of the value that you create, otherwise you would have no worth to the employer and you would either be fired or the employer would close up shop.

well I suppose my employer adds some sort of value to what I create or it wouldn't be enough to keep them in business either. I suppose I question the value of capitalism a lot anyway, but that doesn't mean I have to justify the money I make (in fact saying I should justify the money I make implies I should not question the value of capitalism when employed by capitalists).

The means of production that you use are privately owned by your employer, that's all they provide. Maybe they also do some managerial/clerical labor to lubricate the interaction of the commodity with the market, but this is really only the case for small businesses.

Imagine a shirt that sells for $20 on the market. The shirt is composed of $5 from raw materials and depreciated tools and $15 from your transformative labor. The boss pays you $5 for your work and makes off with $10. The boss steals way more than their investment. They'll tell you (e.g. Paul Pester from the article) that they have more responsibility: this is a bold-faced lie. Corporations are never held responsible for the havoc they wreak on society and the Earth.

The result of this arrangement is the obvious wealth inequality graphs that we've all seen. This is the true injustice. The CRUD worker making $150k and the food laborer making $40k are fighting for scraps. We should focus our fighting upwards.

The employer risks their money in return for the possibility of more money back

Employers take on risk. Risk of employing you, investing in the business, market research, risk of market down-periods, etc. Additionally, they're an intermediary that makes finding/retaining clients easier and more efficient.

So no, I wouldn't call it "stealing", rather an exchange that is not immediately obvious because it's not entirely monetary/transactional in nature.

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