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richardhutnik on 03 March 2012
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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).

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.

The labor theory of value, and things based off of it economically (like Marxism) have been debunked on a whole as not being sufficient.  In a marketplace, people get what they can negotiate, based on the perception of value of the things being offered.  Doesn't matter how hard one works, but how things are perceived to be of value, and the supply of items competing in the same marketspace, and the demand for them.  Hard work, being a good team player, being innovative, smart, and so on, improve the odds, but it is the perceived value, and supply and demand, that end up making a difference.