Scary for property owners, for sure. ;) And there's an important difference between wealth generation like organizing some group of people to produce value, and wealth accumulation at three-comma scales, which usually involves screwing over aforesaid people.

Huh? So if a person generates the wealth in someone else’s name then the organized people are not screwed? How does that make sense?

Generating wealth is separate from how you divvy up the proceeds after. On that second step is where many people have an issue with how it's done today.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, intentionally confusing one with the other is a basic tactic to defend unfair divvying. "Well, you must hate business, then!"

What would be a different way of divvying?

Whatever the parties (owners, managers, workers) involved collectively agree is fair. Instead of the boss earning five orders of magnitude more than the average employee, why not four? But as it stands today, workers don't even get the chance to ask that question. Any hint of organizing is crushed ruthlessly. And if you argue that Musk/Bezos/etc is essential and the company wouldn't exist without him, well, the same applies to the workers in aggregate. That's why owners are paranoid about collective action.

I couldn't reply to a deeply nested comment you made in which you suggested that you'd like to see workers with more power to determine wealth distribution (after the creation is done).

Aren't workers free to not take up job offers, or to change jobs (which they have been doing at record levels recently), which, in effect, would mean they are rejecting the employer's proposed wealth distribution scheme?

I think Noam Chomsky would respond to my question with a resounding "no" (haven't read deeply, but I believe he supports "abolishing the Job Contract as it stands today", or something like that). I'm genuinely curious as to what you think about this.

> usually involves screwing over aforesaid people.

So take a high profile example, say, Elon Musk: explain to me how he is "screwing over" the "aforesaid people".

Because, from my perspective, he has produced massive wealth for many, many people: retail investors, anyone with a 401k, employees, etc. etc. Not to mention, Tesla is almost single handedly responsible for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

A bonanza, to be sure. But does that justify one guy taking 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more from that bonanza than the average employee? Where you land on that question doesn't matter.

The real problem is that if the employees themselves try to organize and ask that question for reals, they get stomped on hard. That is basically the definition of "screwed over". You are allowed to take what is given, but any questioning of the fairness is met with resistance, up to and including state force.

The actions that result in the harshest punishments are the ones the state/baron/company/etc fear most. Empirically, the thing they fear most is workers organizing to negotiate a better deal. Not to get a better deal, simply to ask whether it's possible. As some people say, hey, they are just asking questions.

The workers could happily found a coop that does exactly that. They didn't, he did.

That coops haven't been doing very much makes me inclined to believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with them, either in incentives or organizational cruft.

Should be 100x if not 1000x. That is why individual matters. Some are better than the others. As long as he does not use power to get to that. Not be a communist party member. Or Labour Party,say, to get $ from communist spy etc. just fight the idea.

It is not communism.

He should distribute and be taxed no doubt. But I do not want a world of equals. Sone basic income for all yes. But all equal. No. Not even if forced 5-6 times unequal.

One Steve …

One E…

Ok, so your limit is 1,000X. Fine, whatever. Let's take it as read that that is fair. But he is getting 100,000X or more. And worse, any hint of worker organization to maybe kinda sort of ask whether that's fair gets crushed.

> a scary conception of how property rights should work

I didn't interpret it to have anything to do with changing property rights. We just shouldn't have a single, unelected person who has the power to make decisions at the level of a major nation-state.

Regardless of the reasons it happens, no individual should accumulate that much power. If that means we need to reduce the amount of power someone has based on the amount of property they have, fine. There are many solutions to it. It's still a problem though.

The implication is that your property (aka your wealth, in whatever asset form it lives) is not yours to dispose of as you choose. Rather, the GP thinks it should either be seized or managed someone else (which is really just seizure under a nicer name).

You can’t become a billionaire living on a desert island by yourself. You need a high-functioning civilization for innovation and wealth creation. Those who contribute to wealth creation owe something to the civilization that enabled them to do so. We can debate exactly what they owe, but it is clear they owe something.

> The implication is that your property (aka your wealth, in whatever asset form it lives) is not yours to dispose of as you choose.

That's a bad interpretation. I said is no one should be allowed to accumulate that much wealth.

Why does “elected” make it better? If you had a problem you needed solving would you rather have Elon Musk on the case, or any of the last 4 American presidents?

I would vastly prefer one of the last four people who received a majority vote (Biden, Clinton, Obama, Bush) over Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is a childish narcissist whose chief skills are being rich, ignoring laws, and promoting himself. I would leave the US permanently if he ran it.