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How can you be so thick? If the problem was with profits, we'd have solved it essentially on day one of capitalism.
No, profits are good, it means you can live from your work.
The problem here is greed. And you know what? Unlike with finding out that you're too stupid to get this, finding out where profits stop and greed start is a hard problem. Not individually, because that is about when a business owner starts paying their workforce less and starts buying stupid useless crap to show their status or grow their comfort much beyond the average... No, systematically. Because differences in management style mean that sometimes it makes sense to shrink everyone's income (including the CEO's) to be able to address challenges. But you can't easily tell that apart from greed and dodging taxes.
You can live from your work without profit. Wages are a cost, not the result of profit. I would argue it's very easy to see when greed begins - it's when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work. Obviously there is an argument that senior managers get paid disproportionately, but a part of that will always be stock for which they will continue to earn money without doing anything at all. At least their wage is paid for doing something.
The other commenter misses a key point that under the current system to truly compete with megacorps you need investors to build scale. Independent companies can certainly reinvest their earnings rather than claiming them as profits, which is far better than having them siphoned off, but won't get you anywhere near the kind of cash that you need. And as soon as you have investors, they expect their cut.
So, you want to ban publicly traded companies? That's usually where ownership and involvement with the company get sharply split, once people can freely buy and sell pieces of the company on the open market.
What? I didn't say I wanted to ban anything. And publicly traded companies are not the only ones with shareholders, private companies also can have them.
This only works when you have enough capital to back it up. Can't switch to a salary-based remuneration model without having enough assets to make sure you don't default every other month. But yes indeed, you can do that, once you have made enough profits to have an appropriate capital for this use case.
Yes, that is correct. However the appreciation of "work" is actually the hard part. If it wasn't, micromanagement wouldn't be a thing. So I guess we're saying the same thing, from different angles.
Yeah, so, already, this is going into "hard to gauge" territory. Is the senior manager one of the founding members, that grew a business from nothing, eating pasta and sweating blood for years; is the senior manager one of the founding members, that just was a dick from day one, backed by inherited money or VC money; or is the senior manager someone who just joined along the way, and is now profiting off of the work of others?
See, in these 3 eventualities alone, only the first one actually has any kind of legitimacy for being paid and not doing much. Because then, it is a return on investment, and a pretty damn hard investment at that. However, even in that case, it is extremely easy to overdo it and end up paying yourself more than you would actually deserve, even with the all hard work, the initial risk and stress, and the dedication combined.
I believe you don't necessarily need investors, but then, you need skill, wits, balls, and a whole lot of sheer luck. Oh, and a "sure thing" product/service too. Can't take any chances.
I mean, if you are truly starting a honest business, without much starting capital, and without much preexisting means (e.g. no privileged professional network, access to means of production at extremely low, or no cost, free raw materials/energy, etc), you can't really do it any other way. You gotta reinvest as much as possible, pay yourself the minimum viable amount (pasta/rice only, and necessities. No travel, no leisure, no comfort), to grow the business into something that can ultimately support your life in a more "normal" way.
The main problem with investors isn't even that. Them wanting their cuts is definitely a challenge. But the pressure they can exert on the management, the changes they can enact, the decisions they can force, that is the actual problem with investors. They aren't doing it just for the money. It is a domination kink.
You're being greedy by demanding lower prices. How can you be so hypocritical? If you don't like the businesses that are out their get off your armchair and start competing with a better model. Slackers all of you.
I had to read word by word to make sense of your drivel. At first, it seemed to be sarcasm, but reading "out their" convinced me otherwise. Lrn2English bruh.
For other readers that will find this comment: I'd have written a logical rebuttal explaining why the concentration of wealth, IP laws, predatory financial institutions, etc. make this flat out impossible; and how fair, true capitalism died under Nixon, but it would here be like casting pearls before swine.
So you can't compete because you have no actual abilities. Got it.