• NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Im not sure she’s worked 600x more so far in her 19 year career than the average American does in their entire lifetime.

    Average American lifetime earnings: 1.7 million

    1 billion is 588 times more than 1.7 million.

    I don’t think we’re all equal, or that we all deserve equal wealth, but I think it’d be more just if our income was dependent on how hard we work, and not how the market values the type of work we do.

    • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Sorry, that’s not good for me. Work means 100 different things and can’t always be measured by “how much you do.”

      When the amount of money a person exceeds the benefit they can possibly receive is when society needs to intervene. Money is a social agreement and does not belong to any one person. If we had a cap it would disallow people to exploit others and would give more people opportunity to max out. There could be exceptions and permits for distribution purposes but otherwise if the cup never overflows it will never trickle down.

    • shrugal@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Paying by market value is inevitable in a functioning market economy, but we should balance it out with progressive taxes.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Income being dependant on how hard we work instead of the type of work is a waste of resources though. The goal of economic systems is to allocate our limited resources to our unlimited desires as efficiently as possible.

      Some usage of resources are more efficient than others. Capitalism says that peak efficiency can be reached by letting supply and demand dictate the price. Other systems have other methods.

      Your proposed system values 1 hour of shoveling the same as 1 hour of moving ground with a specialized machine, which makes no sense since the latter produces much more value with the same amount of work. I’m also assuming that amount of work = hours spent doing that work, but how else would you measure it? Any other measuring system is as subjective as 1 hour of Taylor swift = 1800 hours of average american.