The thing last trips me up is the idea that there’s no value added by the employer so it’s all theft. Sure, the value added is definitely less than what the employer keeps, but there is some value added even if it’s only in the sense of an agent getting “buyers” for your labour.
I was playing a little life sim game (Kynseed. It’s not bad)
I bought the town general store, and money just started rolling in. I didn’t really have to do anything. The staff I hired dealt with customers and stocked the shelves, but I was keeping all the profits. I actually felt kind of guilty about how brazenly but also thoughtlessly capitalist it is.
I felt less bad when I started bringing in rarer stuff to sell (because people need to buy monster parts and fish, I guess), but the default is just “I own this so I get money without work”
Anyway. It’s just a video game but it made me think
The thinking, I believe, is not that managerial work isn’t work, but that ownership is not a reason to take a cut of the profits. Think of it more like - in a big corporation, lower and middle management does something useful (theoretically), as does the sales department, and even some of the corporate brass at the top. They still do some form of useful labor, even if primarily social and mental labor rather than physical.
But what do the shareholders do, other than make decisions whose only purpose is to maximize their own payout regardless of its effects on the health of the firm?
The managerial class may be over-compensated in our current system, but they still deserve compensation. But the investor class is parasitic, in this thinking.
The thing last trips me up is the idea that there’s no value added by the employer so it’s all theft. Sure, the value added is definitely less than what the employer keeps, but there is some value added even if it’s only in the sense of an agent getting “buyers” for your labour.
I was playing a little life sim game (Kynseed. It’s not bad)
I bought the town general store, and money just started rolling in. I didn’t really have to do anything. The staff I hired dealt with customers and stocked the shelves, but I was keeping all the profits. I actually felt kind of guilty about how brazenly but also thoughtlessly capitalist it is.
I felt less bad when I started bringing in rarer stuff to sell (because people need to buy monster parts and fish, I guess), but the default is just “I own this so I get money without work”
Anyway. It’s just a video game but it made me think
The thinking, I believe, is not that managerial work isn’t work, but that ownership is not a reason to take a cut of the profits. Think of it more like - in a big corporation, lower and middle management does something useful (theoretically), as does the sales department, and even some of the corporate brass at the top. They still do some form of useful labor, even if primarily social and mental labor rather than physical.
But what do the shareholders do, other than make decisions whose only purpose is to maximize their own payout regardless of its effects on the health of the firm?
The managerial class may be over-compensated in our current system, but they still deserve compensation. But the investor class is parasitic, in this thinking.