Pineapple said:
Mr Khan said:
Pineapple said:
This really is completely useless without being able to read the study, though. If you put greed (ie, interest in obtaining money) as a solely unethical want, it's obvious that the people who have gotten money are greedy by that definition.
But if they had flipped it around, it can easily be seen the other way too. Rich people get rich by doing something beneficial for society. Whether it's betting your money that a company is going to be successful, or actually making the company successful. They do something that makes the world better, and get a personal payoff for that. The rich people are often the ones who made the world a better place on a large scale.
Honestly, the "the rich are evil" philosophy just seems more like a way of justifying that other people gained more money than themselves. "They were only more successful than me because they exploited other people!".
The way I see it, the result is simple. The majority of the rich people did one hell of a lot more good to the world than the majority of the people with less money. And, they got money back for doing that. If you call that greed, that's fine, I just think it's perfectly fair (in the majority of cases).
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This is contrary to the labor theory of value in many cases, the theory that states what you get out of work should be proportional to the work you put into it. Of course, this then gets hazy when you're talking about people who are also playing with land and capital, but if you're talking about direct salary, there is no way that the disparity between executive pay and average worker pay can be justified. The only difference between a housewife who labors with turbotax and such to keep the family finances in line and a wall-street banker who does the same thing is that the banker commands a larger vocabulary and operates at a higher level, but the amount of labor is precisely the same, and therefore should be valued the same.
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I don't really have any problem with being contrary to the labor theory of value, though, as I don't agree with it. My belief is that you should be rewarded by how much good your work does, not how much work you do.
It's sort of the same reason you pay more money to the winner of a sports tournament than the person who finished in last place.
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I feel like your being unfair to the LTV.
I mean, afterall LTV does take into account supply and demand.
Even Marx's version does so.
Being paid based on how much "good" your work does is really an unworkable system, largely for two reasons.
1) People are unproportionally interested in doing jobs that are do good. Teachers don't get paid amazingly well, despite a super strong union, specifically because so many people want to do it for example. Pretty much any job most people see as doing "good" more people want to do. While the jobs seen as marginal busy work, nobody wants to do.
2) Good is subjective, and well unmeasuable. Taking teachers into effect then. Not all teachers are going to do the same level of "good." Therefore teachers should be paid differently. However, how does one decide which teachers are doing the most "good"? Teaching is a very hard thing to measure because so much depends on the situation your in. Teachers the students had before, the students parents... etc.
That's not even getting into people who's effects aren't felt until years later down the line.
Or things like art.
Marginalism is a better way to go for sure.
