Smasharoo wrote:
It's just harder to see how the interest the banker earned off lending money to people is a "contribution"
What is hard to see is how it's a contribution for someone to take that money and pay others for labor, but at a rate low enough that they profit. Profit is what's hard to see as a "contribution" Labor is obviously a contribution.
Except that by that logic, the laborer should give his work freely as well. Being paid is "profiting", right? What you're really talking about doesn't have anything to do with whether what someone *does* contributes to society, but attempting to justify putting some authority in place empowered to arbitrarily decide how much profit is too much.
So if we pay the laborer say $50k/year, that's fine, but if we pay him $500k/year that's too much? That's silly. If others in society were willing to pay the laborer 10 times more for his work, it's most likely because what he's doing is actually worth 10 times as much to them. Thus, his "contribution to society" is 10 times greater. Evaluated by the actual members of society rather than some star chamber somewhere. That seems like a much better way to measure things IMO.
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The guy who digs a path and lays asphalt for a road has an obvious contribution to society.
Yup. And we measure that contribution by paying him for it based on how much *we* actually value the path he dug and laid asphalt on. Seems kinda straightforward to me. If we don't use that method, then what method do you propose we use to determine how much he's contributing?
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The guy who happened to have a pile of money and paid him to do that so his pile could get larger has none.
Except that your issue appears to have less to do with the actual contribution (ie: the work that was done) and more with "I don't like people making too much money". That's your own problem IMO, and has nothing to do with contribution to society.
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Let's be clear, it *absolutely* is "happened to have". Wealth isn't derived from making good decisions in capitalism, it's derived from privilege and luck. Not arguable.
Sigh. Not just arguable, but completely false. I get that in order to trick people into adopting your nutty ideology you have to first lie to them and convince them that their efforts mean nothing and it's all just luck that determines outcomes, but that's simply not true. Wealth is derived via good decisions. Period. There can be luck involved (almost always is), but you must *also* make good decisions. Otherwise the statistics on lottery winners declaring bankruptcy would not be so high. Clearly, it's not just luck.