this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
1277 points (96.5% liked)
Comic Strips
13848 readers
2896 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This isn't exactly the most convincing argument against Rand's philosophy - the workers didn't invent the device and don't work any harder than they did before. Their feeling of entitlement to the profit from it appears to be naked greed unsupported by any moral principle. Acting in one's rational self-interest would include keeping them placated if they can credibly threaten violence, but their role as workers is completely irrelevant in that context.
You're missing a very important point here, which is that the workers are the ones whose labor is turned into profit. That means that if their work is able to generate more money, they are perfectly within their right to demand more, even if they don't necessarily work any harder.
I fuckin HATE ayn rand, but those workers are being paid for their labor, they're not slaves. If that labor provides a little profit or a lot of profit is up to good or bad business practices of the company they're working for, and doesn't need to be shared with them outright, unless it happens naturally as a result of supply/demand making their labor more valuable (because otherwise they'd just go somewhere else where they will be paid more).
The crux here is that for this to happen appropriately, we need to be living in an ideal world with appropriate laws, no corruption, exploitation, loopholes, bribing, lobbying, etc. and we do not currently live in that world, so the above is just theoretical.
I think the point is "profit" is wage theft by definition to some. The workers generate profit, meaning they make someone else money they earned from their labor, and regardless of the structures or systems they're a part of that make that profit possible they should be given that profit.
I think I agree that profit by default is wage theft but I can appreciate that if a system of capital and practices enable the profit past the individual workers wage that there should be some reward to that system. The problem is how that reward is distributed, which right now is poorly done in most places.