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Comment by earthwalker99 | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're tedious and repetitive, and therefore boring. Plus then they turn nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: can you please not use HN primarily for ideological battle? We have to ban accounts that do that because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Blaming literally anything wrong on "capitalism" is peak intellectual laziness. Especially to use a canned definition that no one would agree to except those that would confirm your priors.

Do these problems not exist under feudalism? Mercantilism? Communism? Did soviet inventors fair any better?

You're better off calling a spade a spade. Weird reductionist absolutes about society don't make any of us any smarter and only steer discussions into unhelpful directions.

What's your point? That statement has nothing to do with the problem at hand.

The problem is that he was unfairly compensated by the economic system (capitalism) he works in, and had to fight for years only to just about break even on legal fees.

The guy's gumption led to the invention of a multi-billion dollar pear year industry, and he got basically none of it.

The inverse also happens, though, because socialism fails to capture the value. According to the labor theory of value, for example, his work would’ve been valued at some function of (training * hours worked). Despite creating billions in value for humanity, he would’ve been treated very similarly to the rest of his coworkers

Nobody's talking about socialism.

But let's say it was a more socialist society. As a result, everyone would be earning more, including him. And maybe the CEO that tried to fuck his research would earn less.

IDK but for me that sounds like a very good trade-off, given the CEO did nothing, as always, and got billions.

> The guy's gumption led to the invention of a multi-billion dollar pear year industry, and he got basically none of it.

But... the billion dollar industry is also capitalism? This logic is circular and makes no sense. If there is no capitalism there is no compensation to be distributed in this case, period.

The argument that he was unfairly compensated based on merit is fundamentally a capitalist argument. You can't play it both ways.

Are you saying the outcome here is fair and desirable?

The first step to fixing a problem is admitting one exists. This seems clearly like a failure of capitalism to reward the innovation of a person who actually did the innovation.

How is that not the problem at hand?

The only reason the inventor didn't get properly compensated is because the system is designed to reward existing capital.

I can guarantee you the CEO that inherited the position due to family ties didn't earn $60k a year. Neither he worked for a year and a half without weekends.

This is capitalism.

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