Fred Smith’s wealth comes from the notional value of his ownership of a small fraction of an enormously successful and societally useful business. It’s not as if he has a bank account with billions of dollars in profits paid as salary in it, which you seem to believe.
On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?
Yes, you’re correct that he didn’t earn a billion dollars. He created a company that investors value at $60B, and his remaining 6% share of it is worth $4B. That $60B was not taken from anyone. It was created - out of thin air - by organizing workers in a way that the world needed.
No. The idea that a company is something you "own" rather than a group of people doing some kind of economic activity is a social construct, and one designed to disenfranchise the people doing the ongoing work. A company is a collection of assets and people - to own assets makes sense, to own other people's labour in an ongoing capacity does not.
> On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?
I don't think he should - I think we should change the system that allows people to be worth billions off the backs of others. I don't want redistribution, I want reform.
1. The owners get some property rights ("ownership") for the money they put up to buy the airplanes and related other tools. Or,
2. When an employee is hired by FedEx, they have to come up with... something of the order of $60 billion / 100,000 employees, to pay your share of the enterprise you are becoming part of. Or,
3. We as a society don't have any capital-intensive companies. Who's going to buy the tools, if the one putting up the money doesn't get ownership? (And don't say "government". Government running private enterprise almost always winds up with too much mismanagement and graft.)
In the former (investor) case the payment can be structured as a loan, and/or investors can become stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder cooperative, with their own cut of the earnings. In the latter case it's no issue because the company is buying things with its own resources.
Some companies treat their employees better (Costco) or worse (Walmart), but at the end of the day it's all a byproduct of the structure and behaviors rewarded in capitalism.
The "winners" exploit the hardest, otherwise potential profits are being left on the table and it opens an opportunity for another company (who is willing to go the extra mile to exploit harder) to enter and offer lower prices. Subsequently, the working middle class and poor people (the largest segments of USA population) have their own harsh realities to deal with, and don't have the luxury of choosing more humane yet expensive alternatives when they are purchasing goods and services.
For a contrasting example, I prefer cooperatives where the people involved in the business control it democratically (which can still include directors and managers).
I assume if I am doing the hiring, then I will also be responsible for the additional hiring/firing, selecting the right talent, choosing the right way to compete against existing product/services? Is that not continued activity as I grow my start-up into a category-defining enterprise? How to allocate that profit, into R&D, more people, sales, etc, aka growing a company?
Then after doing that for 10 years that company is now worth billions of dollars and I own it. I don't see where in this chain I have done the exploiting?
I still think that directors should be well compensated commensurate with their capability and role. I just think that they shouldn't be able to exclusively control and take the profits generated by the work of everybody involved. Corporations are autocratic or oligarchic in that way - this leads to the select few that society seems worthy of profit control having more power in our society. This is because the owners can keep workers' wages as low as the market will sustain while inflating their own total compensation to absurd proportions, as we've seen. With a cooperative structure everybody involved has a stake in controlling the company, so executives have to take everybody's needs including the workers, into account, instead of just looking out for themselves and investors.
As for where the exploitation comes in - it probably comes down to different perspectives on the word. To me, it's exploitation if one person is profiting off the labour of another. Of course in a company the shareholders are often also working, but if a company grows to a billion dollars from a million its not because the directors are working 100x harder.
You believe that when you join an organization you automatically have a say in how it is run.
So yeah, I think you should have a voice in how the company you work for is run.
(This of course does not apply to the very disadvantaged)
How is providing the two jobs not contributing to the economy?
How do you clear $60,000 on widgets? What about the costs of supplies, insurance, compliance to government regulations, city/state/county/federal taxes, import duties,R&D, documentation, advertising, and so on?
I didn't make an argument about whether it was contributing to the economy or not, but that doesn't matter - slavery contributed to the economy too, but it's also morally wrong.
It's a stripped down hypothetical on purpose, to get to the heart of the question. Non-labour material concerns are left as an exercise for the reader.
We live in different world. Thank you for your response.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/exploita...
> the act of using someone unfairly for your own advantage
But we probably just disagree on the meaning of "unfairly" within that definition.
> one person profits off the work of another
Trade needs to benefit both parties.
Second, yes the profit in the marketplace is still exploitative to a degree, but we don't have a viable alternative so there's not much to do about that. I don't believe there's much point critiquing something when there's no alternative.