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Comment by cambaceres | Hacker News Reader

What you and other students of Karl Marx always ignore is the fact that if company owners was not allowed to earn profit then there would be no companies founded, meaning that the workers would not have jobs.

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I think the idea is that the workers would profit from their labour and control what gets produced.

I’m not sure that means companies wouldn’t be started and everyone would sit around doing nothing.

They can do that, nothing stops people from setting up co-ops today, I've been in one as well in fact. But at the same time, if I'm making something lucrative, I'd want to profit from it. That other people I hire are willing to work for the wage I give them is their problem, since if they don't like the wage, they can always go elsewhere (given that they are skilled workers, not workers who can find no other job in some company town or something).

Your argument possesses a fundamental mistake that most venture capitalists make: that the demand is infinitely elastic but supply is completely fixed; in other words, the manufacturers being able to perfectly impose what consumers want to consume.

I don't see where I imply that supply is fixed. I don't think that makes sense even from a VC point of view, since the company they fund is itself another manufacturer or producer of goods, thereby increasing the supply.

> since if they don't like the wage, they can always go elsewhere

Capitalists are well known to collude to keep pay down and viciously suppress unions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/nlrb-starbucks-union-buffalo-...

What you and other billionaire boot-lickers ignore is that earning $10 million from starting a company is very reasonable, "earning" $100 billion is just stealing from many thousands of employees. We really should NOT need a logarithmic scale when talking about wealth inequality.

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