Tylenullx

3y

stay hatin

K DOG 99

3y

You aren't a part of their group bro

Skinn Foley

3y

If, hypothetically, you were able to pay every employee a living wage while still becoming a billionaire, and you allowed the workers to unionize, in a vacuum, your argument holds some water.

However, this is where macroeconomic a***ysis comes into play.

You won't be the only entrepreneur in town. You will need to compete against other firms to remain solvent. But moreover, the nature of the competition is entirely guided by the basic economic law of supply and demand.

Eventually, while your business may be able to hold onto a steady flow of customers, the initial rush of a new business opening will not last forever. You won't have a line out the door everyday, even if you're turning a net profit. This isn't a problem by itself...until you factor in the cost of rent, upkeep, utilities, replenishing raw materials, taxes, wages*, and so forth. The cost of maintaining/purchasing/paying for all these things is dictated by a competitive market economy that is driven by the incentive to generate superprofits for capitalists so they can combat declining demand from eventual market saturation of the commodities they produce/services they provide, so that they can diversify their revenue streams, thereby continuing to make money, as is required to survive in a capitalist society. Otherwise, the firm will become insolvent or will be extremely precarious with no room for error or a major market shift, leaving the business at risk of folding (i.e. a pandemic shutting down local businesses and returning the small-time capitalist back to the working class if and when their businesses fold).

So, how does the capitalist combat this? The commodities they sell or services they provide will decline in demand, thus generating less and less profit over time (this is a basic economic principle in capitalism known as diminishing returns), thus generating less revenue, while the costs of raw materials, rent, utilities, and so forth, either remain static or become more expensive relative to currency inflation due to economic growth and increased federal debt taken on for various reasons (a certain level of federal debt is also not just unavoidable, but beneficial, for a capitalist society, even for the workers). As they cannot control the influx of consumers, and cannot control the cost of upkeep, rent, utilities, and replenishment of raw materials, they need to skim the money off of the workers in order to create superprofits, or revenue that goes beyond the replenishment of raw resources for the firm to continue to produce commodities.

After this, the capitalist will either be able to try to weather the storm in their limited storefront and perhaps try to create new commodities or services to generate demand, and thus heighten revenue, or can reinvest these superprofits into new ventures for the same reason. But what they cannot do, which is again a fundamental law of capitalism outlined in the "Iron Law of Wages", is pay the worker anything more than the base requirement for them to survive, and to compensate them for skills that took extra economic investment on the worker's behalf, including work experience attained through the worker's sale of their labor power to the capitalist in return for a wage, in order for the capitalist to ensure optimal functionality of the firm, and thus better guarantee consistent revenue. As such, you end up with a relatively privileged labor elite and a huge number of common workers who, to varying degrees, are having their wages skimmed off the top by the capitalist so that the capitalist can continue to generate competitive profits for the firm so that it can not only remain solvent, but compete with the rates of growth and services/commodities provided by other businesses in the field.

This furthermore doesn't take into account the environmental question of the right of an individual to exploit miles of land to build businesses on and to horde massive amounts of natural resources privately to produce these commodities, which eventually requires imperialist invasion of foreign territories to attain increased amounts of raw materials as domestic natural resources dry up from continued land exploitation and market growth.

Therefore, the idea that you could pay workers a truly living wage beyond the bare minimum for survival despite their labor actually propping the business up, and become a billionaire in the process, is a logical fallacy.

Great question, had to think about the answer for a little bit