^You needed a whole study to find out people are racist and have less trust for people who don't look like themselves?
Oh, ok. I think I understand your views.
You think the current system is unfair to non-capitalists. "It creates inequalities as people with the means of production control how much workers make. When workers and owners do not make the same, owners steal from workers. The owners steal the fruits of worker's labor.
You think capital is the source of all evil as it facilitates this theft."
Did I get it right?
Let me just say you have a very narrow, somewhat tunneled vision on the issue. When you have a good idea for a product, you go out and raise capital, organize the business, hire skilled people to achieve your vision, you are taking huge risks that the whole venture might fail, many times you work for months 24/7 to get your business off the ground before any workers show up at your shop. Workers you hire demand certain salary and you seek workers to maximize return on your capital, i.e. the best skills for the least money. At no point, you steal their salary or their opportunities. They are at all times in full control of their careers. Well, maybe 2-4 weeks notice, as stipulated by the employment contract, that is about it.
You think that workers hired by a well-running business deserve the share of the business profits. On what grounds? That would be the real theft. If I have a software company and I am doing 10M revenue and 1M profit and I need to expand and I hire 10 new developers (10x100K) to implement the new version of my product, and I am successful and the revenues go to 200M and 20M profit, I need to share the 20M with my 10 new developers? On what grounds? They were nowhere my business when I was working on it in my basement, eating noodles for 5 years. How in the world would this be fair? What about if instead of 20M profit, I incur 5M losses, would the 10 new developers share the losses with me?
Do I agree that the system seems unfair on the surface? Of course. You see some people flushing their wealth while others starve or go homeless. You have to ask yourself the why question? Not jump to the conclusion that the system is automatically fundamentally wrong.
You're mostly right but wrong about me thinking everyone should be paid the same. I think people should be compensated for their ideas, initial investments, risk, and all the work they put into creating something but that does have a limit. There is an actual value into the amount of work that went into that. I'm not pretending to know what that value is in each case but I know that its a lot more than the typical worker, and a lot less than the unlimited percentage it has become through capitalism.
Bezos, for example, definitely deserved to compensation for creating the company, but at some point, he had been fully compensated and everything beyond that is actually theft from the people who are keeping the company going and the people who are paying the true costs. Profit gets magnified by passing costs onto other people and externalizing those costs from the company budget. The best companies are experts at doing this. Making someone else pay your costs is a form of theft. Even if you don't know who that person is, you're still stealing from them.
Its a two way street. Wouldn't you think its weird if you had to pay every employee who ever worked at your company for the rest of their life? It makes sense that we pay workers for the work they did and thats it so why not do the same for the owners?
Is it wrong for some people? Of course. People who just want the 9-5 job, with a steady paycheck, no need to worry about job security or business stability. People without any skills or desires to own the "means of production", people who do not want to own real property, people who do not want to run any sort of business, or assume any risk in life in general. To those people, it is definitely the wrong system. They will suffer financially under it. They will be scraping by their whole lives and die with mortgages on their homes.
When I first came to North America, I worked in aluminum extruder factories, farms, bakeries and the people I met made me think. I knew right then I do not want to work for 3 years to be able to afford to buy a used car. I remember one toothless guy, he was maybe 30 years old, we were eating our miserable sandwiches, he finished his, took his cigarettes and proudly announced that if I work for 3 years in this factory I might be able to buy a used Buick to drive to work. He worked there for 5 years, still was riding the bus. I looked at him with great sadness because I felt sorry for him. I knew he will die in that factory and never be able to buy that car. The same year I enrolled in the community college.
The same thing happened when I first started working after I graduated from university. I was hired as a "full-time" employee, I quickly realized that what they were paying me would not get me anywhere. I needed more. I befriended some contractors who enlightened me on the benefits of contracting.
I switched within months to triple my "salary". This was still not enough to feel secure. I watched how other contractors had supply contracts to provide contractors and get $10-20/hr for every hour of work. I needed that, and that is what I did for a while.
I never stole any money from anyone. People willingly hired me, I willingly paid people who I hired in return.
You think people who do dangerous jobs are taking all the risks. Nothing can be further from the truth.
You fail to understand what risk is. You only think of the risk of personal injury but forgetting all the business risks, legal liabilities, insurance costs. Who do you think is bearing those risks and costs?
I worked with many brilliant developers who told me they just want a full-time job, I tried to help them to show them the way to a brighter future, they did not feel comfortable taking all the risks. So they are still working in their 50s and 60s. They are the same as the toothless guy I met at the aluminum extruder factory, 30 years ago. Same mentality, same result.
If you have a worker's mentality, you will be a worker all your life, with terrible results. You will die poor. That is just the way it is.
Society cannot function without labor. A worker's mentality is necessary to maintain labor. This is why capitalism is unsustainable. You cannot endlessly redistribute wealth away from labor and towards the top. Our current system depends on people believing in the scam that their work will pay off. Eventually, the myth that hard work pays off will die. There needs to be a more diverse market for capital. If you put capital in the hands of many people, you would get a more ethical relationship between capital and labor because labor would have more opportunities to shop around for capital and negotiate "prices". The current state of affairs means that the masses compete for who can offer the lowest priced labor to the very few people who have capital and those with capital rarely have to compete in a market for labor because they have millions of choices. Its not a balanced market.
PS. I feel I need to write a book for people like you to re-educate them on capitalism. There seem to be a large, growing dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and I feel that if people are not educated on how to effectively function in it, we'll have a bloody "occupy and kill movement". The last one was just a prelude, I am afraid. I think the education system in North America is failing students at that task.
"Reeducation" is an interesting word choice for someone who fears the Soviet system. The book idea is completely illogical. Not only because you're not going to teach morals out of someone, but because knowing how to function is not the problem. The problem I have with capitalism is the people my success is stealing from. Ignorance is on your side. The most educated nations have all evolved into social democracies. If everyone knew how the system worked, the American system would collapse in a day. This is inevitably how capitalism will end. The working class will eventually realize the game is rigged against them and quit or change the rules.
There is no way to both effectively and ethically function in capitalism. You have to pick one of the two. You can either be the rich thief or the poor working fool. There is only some in-between because of government intervention that exists in spite of capitalism.
