Hacker News Reader

Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.

Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.

View on HN

I'm not making an argument about fairness. It's clearly unfair. I also don't dispute that wealthy people benefit from exploitation, just like we all benefit from labor in low wage countries.

However, I do dispute that wealth extraction is the primary source of wealth for the wealthy. Just like an engineer can save 100k in monthly AWS charges with 15 minutes of optimization work a good capital allocator can transform pointless labor that produces little to no value into labor that benefits society. The optimization process is the same: the engineer saves clock cycles and the capital allocator saves labor hours.

Labor is necessary ingredient for wealth, but labor by itself produces nothing. That's why humanity has lived in mud huts for eons, despite working every waking hour.

You seem focused on the labor theory of value, and sidestep completely the entire idea of investors, or the entrepreneurial function they serve.

Advocate for higher taxes if you wish, but acknowledge that economics are not a zero-sum game and propose an alternative to savvy investment, unless you simply want to foment division or to upend modern capitalism entirely.

Economics are only not a zero-sum game to the extent physics permits it to be. No amount of financial wizardry can change the fact that, ultimately, it's the labor that produces all wealth on the planet. Investors in modern capitalism, for the most part, serve the function of parasites, so yes, it would be very nice to upend it entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com