You’re kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I’m all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
Not really. Workers are dropped before the owner loses out. The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost. Certainly not for mega corporations, where the owner who took the original risk is often long gone. It’s now run by MBAs who’s only skill is increasing shareholder value at the expense of all else.
The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost.
This isn’t even quite true because even established companies can fail after taking additional (or even by not doing so), but you’re basically arguing “once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!” Of course if you discount the risk people take, there is no risk.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is a big imbalance now and laborers are generally getting screwed. But there is a reason I decided to take the path of becoming a skilled laborer instead of s business owner: I don’t want to take that risk.
I can and do easily jump from one job to another, with little worry at all.
once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!”
No, that’s a strawman. The risk is far reduced, not zero. To get to zero, you have to be Too Big To Fail and have the government bail you out.
The reduction in risk is obvious when you see how layoffs work. The CEO gets a big bonus for walking a whole lot of people out the door.
Libertarian types want to start with stories about farmers selling corn by the side of the road, and then expect you to believe the argument still holds when scaled up to Fortune 500s.
You’re nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesn’t change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and “risks” 30% of it starting a business. Let’s say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he “risked” a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. It’s a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos “built Amazon” with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents could’ve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isn’t how it played out is because parents don’t like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their “right mind” would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You can’t “shield” yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that “rich people are financially more secure so it’s easier for them to take risk” I 100% agree. There’s no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize “the uterine lottery.”
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the “risk” taken by people just being paid to do labor. Don’t get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didn’t invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. It’s just that this isn’t infinite and doesn’t mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly “well, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!”
It’s not, and this is specifically why I’ve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. It’s easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, it’s not that it’s “easier” for rich people, it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there’s no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What’s the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it’s a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist’s profit, it’s always theft.
We need to incentivize risking capital
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn’t function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It’s a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn’t be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don’t find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
I had a near zero cost business. Basically I needed a computer, phone (already had that) and M365. It was $60 to create the biz myself. Any professional services company falls into this category. So they do exist, even if in small numbers.
Business consulting. Theoretically, anyone can do it without training and experience (although unlikely due to client expectations). But graphic design falls into this category and is more likely to be possible with a portfolio rather than education. Also, I got paid for all of my experience that allowed me to become a consultant, which in turn covered the cost of my schooling - so I don’t really count that. Basically, you can create this kind of business with some elbow grease.
Sorry to say but graphic design clients are dwindling extremely fast. People will constantly have arguments about the value/ethics of AI under capitalism (less work means more suffering in a capitalist society, broken system but that’s what we have). However, in the real world AI exists, and capitalists have access to what they need, even if you don’t want to call what DALLE produces art.
Same goes for videography, programming, essentially anything that requires the development of skill on a computer/digitally has the potential to be massively automated. Even if you believe AI can never match human intellect because of some special sauce inside of our organic sacks, it’s already producing content at the level of professionals. Not the highest level professionals, usually the lowest level ones actually, but without low-level jobs people don’t have clear paths to develop their resumes/careers.
Yeah, I agree we are in a big economic shift (akin to the invention of the tractor that displaced hundreds of thousands of people - side note, why does no one talk about the ethics of the tractor?). I expect AI drive new business models, and some people will lose their jobs or have them greatly changed. But I’m not totally sure that any of that negates the possibility of some (albeit few) low startup cost businesses. They may just look different that they did 10 years ago.
You are right, btw, about a 20 year training gap/issue. Businesses have to figure out how to rapidly develop their people, or they will have no experts standing at the end of the AI machine - risking the overall quality of their work and products.
Here’s how I try to wrap my mind around the changes coming (I know it isn’t exactly the same, but it does put the scope of AI into perspective): Amazon started as an online bookstore out of a garage. People actually laughed at them. Today, they are responsible for huge shifts in the retail and book publishing industries. Lots of jobs were lost, but other jobs and opportunities were created (such as self publishing for low cost). AI is like this, but amplified.
The comparison to the industrial revolution ignores a qualitative difference between this and that; we’re in an age where automation can fully automate away jobs. When the industrial revolution happened, it absolutely did deteriorate working and living conditions for essentially everyone, however humans were still needed. It should be noted that having a system where less work leads to worse outcomes is a fundamentally toxic and broken economic system, but that’s what capitalism is.
This next thought makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we might actually not have special sauce in our organic sacks. It’s possible that human-level intelligence/expertise is achievable from AI (even if it’s not LLMs that get there), and it’s also possible that robotics becomes as versatile as humans at movement.
Yes, AI and robots are expensive, but you want to know what else is insanely expensive? Humans. I cost my employer $150,000 a year. If they could subscribe to a future GPT6 that out performed me and my coworkers for $1000 a month that would save them a metric fuckload of money. Same thing with buying a super versatile robot, sure it might be like $100,000 for a single robot, but if it lasts 10 years it’s $10,000 a year and can work far longer hours and much more consistently than a human.
What we’re talking about with any non-dysfunctional economic system is utopia, a world where nobody needs to work and everything is maintained, developed, and expanded without human intervention. Under capitalism this utopia becomes a dystopia, it leads to mass starvation, lack of resource distribution, and death.
Really now? Wanna become a nanny pimp? Maybe organize a life couch group? Give me a break. All actual service jobs (jobs that don’t require renting or owning an office/place of some kind) require specialized equipment or a degree, and you’ll be hard pressed to find such a business opportunity without strong competition. Most people can’t afford to start a business, nor have the knowhow.
And when the zero entry cost business is invented, that might work!
You’re kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I’m all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
Not really. Workers are dropped before the owner loses out. The risk is not balanced after a certain startup cost. Certainly not for mega corporations, where the owner who took the original risk is often long gone. It’s now run by MBAs who’s only skill is increasing shareholder value at the expense of all else.
This isn’t even quite true because even established companies can fail after taking additional (or even by not doing so), but you’re basically arguing “once you’ve gotten past the initial risk, there is no risk!” Of course if you discount the risk people take, there is no risk.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree that there is a big imbalance now and laborers are generally getting screwed. But there is a reason I decided to take the path of becoming a skilled laborer instead of s business owner: I don’t want to take that risk.
I can and do easily jump from one job to another, with little worry at all.
No, that’s a strawman. The risk is far reduced, not zero. To get to zero, you have to be Too Big To Fail and have the government bail you out.
The reduction in risk is obvious when you see how layoffs work. The CEO gets a big bonus for walking a whole lot of people out the door.
Libertarian types want to start with stories about farmers selling corn by the side of the road, and then expect you to believe the argument still holds when scaled up to Fortune 500s.
You’re nit picking. Whether the risk goes to zero or just very low, that doesn’t change the point that there is generally significant risk to start up, which does not exist with labor. Labor is almost always a zero startup risk, a business is almost always the opposite.
You keep saying the word risk, and liberal capitalists do this all the time. Companies limit personal liability, so risk goes to zero there for a bunch of legal issues.
What most people are talking about is money, but not everyone has access to money. If you take two people, one born into a rich family, and another born into a homeless family, the rich kid gets a massive inheritance and “risks” 30% of it starting a business. Let’s say he hires the person born into a homeless family.
The liberal conception here is that the rich person, handed a massive amount of cash for absolutely nothing, deserves the surplus value of labor from the poor person because he “risked” a small part of his inheritance that the poor person never had access to. It’s a wild assertion.
This might seem fabricated, but in the real world this is how it goes, people with capital accumulate more capital. Jeff Bezos “built Amazon” with a $245,000 loan from his parents, and worked out of their garage. He then used that loan and later capital investments to hire people to actually build Amazon.
His parents could’ve just as easily gone the standard capitalist route, and instead of loaning the money instead valuated the company at $300,000 and assumed ~80% ownership for the company. The only reason this isn’t how it played out is because parents don’t like exploiting their kids, there was a biological component at play that disallowed the standard capitalist exploitation from taking place. So they offered him a deal that no capitalist in their “right mind” would offer, because it left Jeff with far too much and the capitalist with far less.
Sure, they can limit it, and you can shield yourself personally from losses taken by the company, but there is a still (generally speaking, again) a significant financial risk to starting a company at all. You can’t “shield” yourself from start up costs.
If the argument is that “rich people are financially more secure so it’s easier for them to take risk” I 100% agree. There’s no question that rich people start off with a massive head start. I fully recognize “the uterine lottery.”
But the meme is about this risk being equal to the “risk” taken by people just being paid to do labor. Don’t get my position wrong, I believe labor deserves way more of a share right now. But there is no risk in it. Sure, you can lose your job which sucks, but (again generally speaking, there are exceptions e.g. people might move across the country to take a job) you didn’t invest any money into starting the job. So now you are out a job and need to find a new one. You are not in the negative.
And we need this. We need to incentivize risking capitol to make capitol, as that helps labor too. It’s just that this isn’t infinite and doesn’t mean people should be able to amass any and all wealth they can. There is a middle ground and that is where the discussion needs to be. Not in this silly “well, labor is really involved in the risk of losses too!!”
It’s not, and this is specifically why I’ve avoided multiple opportunities to risk shit to start a new company: I would rather be a skilled laborer as I can just jump from job to job when I want, than to risk what seems to me to be a lot of money on trying to start a company. Too much pressure. It’s easy for me to not give a shit.
You misunderstood my argument slightly, it’s not that it’s “easier” for rich people, it’s that it’s literally impossible to risk money you don’t have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there’s no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What’s the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn’t justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it’s a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist’s profit, it’s always theft.
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn’t function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It’s a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn’t be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don’t find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
deleted by creator
And you’re completely missing the point that this argument doesn’t scale.
I had a near zero cost business. Basically I needed a computer, phone (already had that) and M365. It was $60 to create the biz myself. Any professional services company falls into this category. So they do exist, even if in small numbers.
What is it that you did? Professional service implies a profession that you’d need training/experience for which is a cost.
Business consulting. Theoretically, anyone can do it without training and experience (although unlikely due to client expectations). But graphic design falls into this category and is more likely to be possible with a portfolio rather than education. Also, I got paid for all of my experience that allowed me to become a consultant, which in turn covered the cost of my schooling - so I don’t really count that. Basically, you can create this kind of business with some elbow grease.
Sorry to say but graphic design clients are dwindling extremely fast. People will constantly have arguments about the value/ethics of AI under capitalism (less work means more suffering in a capitalist society, broken system but that’s what we have). However, in the real world AI exists, and capitalists have access to what they need, even if you don’t want to call what DALLE produces art.
Same goes for videography, programming, essentially anything that requires the development of skill on a computer/digitally has the potential to be massively automated. Even if you believe AI can never match human intellect because of some special sauce inside of our organic sacks, it’s already producing content at the level of professionals. Not the highest level professionals, usually the lowest level ones actually, but without low-level jobs people don’t have clear paths to develop their resumes/careers.
Yeah, I agree we are in a big economic shift (akin to the invention of the tractor that displaced hundreds of thousands of people - side note, why does no one talk about the ethics of the tractor?). I expect AI drive new business models, and some people will lose their jobs or have them greatly changed. But I’m not totally sure that any of that negates the possibility of some (albeit few) low startup cost businesses. They may just look different that they did 10 years ago.
You are right, btw, about a 20 year training gap/issue. Businesses have to figure out how to rapidly develop their people, or they will have no experts standing at the end of the AI machine - risking the overall quality of their work and products.
Here’s how I try to wrap my mind around the changes coming (I know it isn’t exactly the same, but it does put the scope of AI into perspective): Amazon started as an online bookstore out of a garage. People actually laughed at them. Today, they are responsible for huge shifts in the retail and book publishing industries. Lots of jobs were lost, but other jobs and opportunities were created (such as self publishing for low cost). AI is like this, but amplified.
The comparison to the industrial revolution ignores a qualitative difference between this and that; we’re in an age where automation can fully automate away jobs. When the industrial revolution happened, it absolutely did deteriorate working and living conditions for essentially everyone, however humans were still needed. It should be noted that having a system where less work leads to worse outcomes is a fundamentally toxic and broken economic system, but that’s what capitalism is.
This next thought makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we might actually not have special sauce in our organic sacks. It’s possible that human-level intelligence/expertise is achievable from AI (even if it’s not LLMs that get there), and it’s also possible that robotics becomes as versatile as humans at movement.
Yes, AI and robots are expensive, but you want to know what else is insanely expensive? Humans. I cost my employer $150,000 a year. If they could subscribe to a future GPT6 that out performed me and my coworkers for $1000 a month that would save them a metric fuckload of money. Same thing with buying a super versatile robot, sure it might be like $100,000 for a single robot, but if it lasts 10 years it’s $10,000 a year and can work far longer hours and much more consistently than a human.
What we’re talking about with any non-dysfunctional economic system is utopia, a world where nobody needs to work and everything is maintained, developed, and expanded without human intervention. Under capitalism this utopia becomes a dystopia, it leads to mass starvation, lack of resource distribution, and death.
There’s lots of 0 entry cost business. Problem is they exist because no one wants to do that work themselves.
Really now? Wanna become a nanny pimp? Maybe organize a life couch group? Give me a break. All actual service jobs (jobs that don’t require renting or owning an office/place of some kind) require specialized equipment or a degree, and you’ll be hard pressed to find such a business opportunity without strong competition. Most people can’t afford to start a business, nor have the knowhow.
And this is where that risk comes from. I’ll list a pile right now:
Most don’t have the know how, but you know how you get it? You take the risk and try.