• 7heo@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • BluesF@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 months ago

        I would argue it’s very easy to see when greed begins - it’s when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work.

        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.

    • C126@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        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.