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Everything you buy from a company he owns takes a cut to give to him. That is value you don't get for your hard earned money.
On top of that, Mr Buffet himself, as well as magnates in general, manipulate both your salary and cost of goods so that you get even less for your hard work.
Amazon workers not being able to pee at work for a salary they can't really live on seems another example.
Not necessarily, as not all companies give dividents or buybacks. But let's say they all do. The same argument applies to employees: they get a cut of a companies income? I think a fair deal: as long as they make something I want or need at a price I agree to I'll buy it. Otherwise I won't.
Not really, I'm self-employed. As to the price of goods, see the above. We manipulate it just as well. Other large manipulators are monetary policy and taxes.
How's that related to individual's net worth? Customers will always want goods cheap, even if a company's ownership is diluted to the point that each shareholder isn't a billionair. My customers would happily have me work for free or negative prices.
Very few companies run at a loss for long. All profit is on the back of the workers, and if that isn't returned to them, it is parasitism. Regardless if the owner takes dividends, or borrows against the increased value of their stocks, or any other enrichment of them, is at the expense of the laborer.
I'll mention that I'm not necessarily against it, but it is the central tenet of capitalism.
Issue is, the labourer is doing the work, why aren't they entitled to the value of that work? How come someone gets to just grab 20% to pay off those who don't produce the same value?
You don't have any economic muscle against the big players in your market. Are you really pricing according to the cost of production? More probably you're pricing close to market value, which you aren't deciding on your own. The bigger fish have more say in that then you do, on both the demand and supply side.
Monetary policy is a tool to affect the distribution of money, it does not itself extract or inject value.
Taxes only extract value with corruption. All taxed money put into the commons, no matter how inefficiently, are for the public good and stimulation of the economy. The extraction comes with parasitism and hoarding which happens when individuals are enriched at the expense of others. This happens through corruption ofc, both in embezzlement, underdelivered value and exploitative cash flows.
Oh, it's not about net worth. It's meant to be an example where the owner class is extracting inhumane amounts of value from the employees. Making Bezos rich at the expense of both the employees and the rest of us having to bear the loss of years of quality life with the following reduced production, increased need of social and medical support, and extracted value.
To summarise: Any money taken away from the people doing the work, directly or indirectly, is exploitation.
I happen to think exploitation is unethical.
It is though. My original post was: I don't care if there are high net worth individuals. Did you switcharoo my own opinion?
There's quite a few falsehoods in your comment, such as:
Au contraire, it affects inflation, severily, and therefore the relative value of your savings and past work.
The options for a company are not limited to divident/buyback vs run at a loss, as you seem to be implying.
So looking at history, it's only a problem in every government that's ever been?
Not necessarily. Examples: (a) How would you price a service like insurance? (b) how would you value the engineer of a new type of bicycle hub? He hasn't left his computer, didn't touch a single nail. (c) How should the inventor of a song be renumerated? Is the value created, that people are paying for, solely the network engineers at spotify?
I'm afraid that that's a conclusion based on false arguments.
Then perhaps we are starting from different points, my model is basically that an economy is a closed system until either a) resources, innovation or performed work inputs more value or b) these are removed from circulation.
Under that model inflation, services, taxes, are all value neutral for a certain scope of economy. Your private finances are of course going to be affected by taxes and inflation, but total world or even national economy not so much.
To put it in simpler terms, all goods and services exchanged for money don't change the economy as long as that money gets spent again.
It's a simplified model ofc, it doesn't take into account for example moving value between countries/markets (how do we account for stuff sent into space? Or sent to other countries?).
To help with understanding your perspective, could you kindly explain how high net worth individuals come to their situation within your model?
They don't get a cut, they get a wage. That wage is as low as it is because of lobbying from wealthy fucks, and they can reduce it to 0 by firing you with flimsy reasoning. The workers make the rich rich, and the rich makes the workers poor.
Customers want goods cheap, but they're really bad at noticing what's cheap and what's manipulative. JC Penny tried to remove sales and just offer cheaper clothes, but people wanted more expensive clothes with a 50% off label on it. Shops will inflate the price on a luxury item to make a lower-priced item look reasonable, even if the lower price is still inflated.