The usual relevant questions here are:

1) Are there externalized costs?

2) How much the value is actually created by owners vs other labor within the company?

3) Are all participants rewarded proportionally to the value they create, or is there a labor-value arbitrage going on?

One simplifying/ideological model attributes the company's existence essentially to the owners and posits therefore obviously they deserve all the value and/or that every employee is participating purely voluntarily and so whatever they agree to must necessarily be fair. Another only recognizes the labor theory of value and would find anything other than a coop immoral.

> 2. Your company produces something hugely useful / beneficial for society; in other words, it produces something hugely valuable.

2. Your company extracts value from everywhere it can, to the detriment of it's counterparties: employees, the environment, customers, partners, contractors

For one example: Amazon warehouse employees (contractors?) are not paid very well for very hard work. I'm sure someone has a comeback for this, but it is an example of value extraction.

Another: Amazon does not do a great job of policing counterfeits, to the detriment of customers.

Another: Sellers on Amazon have a variety of complaints, you can look them up.

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If the business existed for the purpose of being ethical, these conditions would not exist. The business exists for the purpose of extracting value.

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Edit: Put another way - If your company ONLY produces something highly valuable, then someone can simply create a competing product and undercut you.

An example of this is looking at drug prices when patents expire. Generic drugs can be sold for MUCH cheaper than the patent protected "name brand" drug. The product is highly valuable, but may not be high cost, unless it is protected in some way.

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Edit edit: If you want to defend these companies or capitalism in general, that's fine with me.

I would like to gently point out that sometimes we dance on very fine lines of morality in the course of doing business.

I used to work at a car part store and the majority of the staff was teenagers looking to get into the car world (either future mechanics, or car parts managers) but they WAY under paid us for the type of work. Repair shops looking for specialty parts that someone with mechanics experience should really be looking for, not some teenager asking "whats a brake rotor?". We had a revolving door of workers and our customers knew we were terrible and likely to get the wrong part. Getting screamed at by customers was daily because we had no idea what they were doing. However the exploitation was a trade off of, "I'll get a year experience and go to a dealership" or "I just need a filler job until I get a better job". It was ""exploitive"" but it was extremely helpful to me, it was the only job willing to let me be part time while in school that didn't involve hard physical labour. I did more exploitive jobs before, working 10+ hours hand shoveling snow in -40 for $10/hour. That company didn't last very long because they drained the whole city of potential employees and never knew who was gonna show the next day.

You can read this as dismissive, but it does show the strength of the drive to rationalize; which is one of my biggest problems with things like "rational skepticism". It's too easy to rationalize something you already believe, or a situation you just happen to find yourself in. It's too fun to 'debunk' things, and too much of a chore to actually change beliefs.

I realize the obvious counter "That's not real rational skepticism".

It was a good opportunity for me since I had nothing much to offer most employers. It was between that or unemployed.

I understand that but it doesn’t justify why it had to be a bad work environment.

Whats your solution though? Strike? People will still apply and work there because it's bad, but not slave labour. Unionize? They'll entirely stop hiring people without experience and change their business model.

Their business model was to be the cheapest. Cheapest employees, cheapest parts. They filled the market share for people looking for cheap cheap parts. That involves crappy service.

If they raised their employee pay, the entire business model goes belly up. That means, no more cheap cheap parts for customers and no entry job positions for employees looking to break the field.

It was a delicate balance of ""exploitation"" and keeping them happy enough they are willing to stay.

If you have nothing to offer the company besides a pulse, you don't get to pick and choose. Why would that be fair to force a company to pay more for no reason? Sometimes you put up with bullshit for a couple years and then you get to be more picky.

You are addressing a seperate claim to the one made. The actual claim is that there are no ethical super-wealthy people, not that such a thing is a logical impossibility.

I guess my issue is that the claim was not demonstrated in any way whatsoever besides "because I say so", so I assumed that the poster must think that it is a logical impossibility – otherwise how could they be so certain?

A thing can have a probability of zero, while being logically possible.

I'm not seeing any probabilistic models either.

You don't become super wealthy without doing something shady or being a greedy asshole. It's just not possible to beat out the competition and accumulate that much wealth without taking morally questionable shortcuts.

Here's a short list of things that super rich people do:

- screwing someone over

- treating people like robots

- lying/deception

- taking advantage of people in poorer countries

- taking advantage of tax loopholes

- bending the law

- buying off politicians

- bullying people

- etc.

You saying that this is required is not proof that it is so.

OP said "super wealthy" not wealthy. There is a difference.

Thank you. I purposefully tried to make my comment as easy to agree with as possible but apparently there are a LOT of people in denial because it got downvoted to oblivion and flagged.

I also said super wealthy.

The company has no externalities or strategic competitors and doesn't leverage market dominance? Is it situated at the North Pole and run by a jolly old man in a bright red suit?

This is very reductive and #2 is immediately a large leap.

A large leap in what way? That companies have a hard time producing useful things, or that those useful things are valuable?

3 is actually two steps:

3a. Your company is therefore valuable. 3b. Your company being valuable makes you super wealthy.

3b is unethical.

3b is not a new step, that's just a repetition of step 1. Are you saying you believe ownership of a company is unethical?

It seems to be that statement needs to be justified with a little bit more than "because I say so".

Well, there's plenty of ways to reduce one's wealth. Taxes, charitable donations (MacKenzie Scott), more ownership of the company by employees, and so on. But no, I don't think it is ethical for people to be billionaires.

What exactly are you objecting to when it comes to billionaires, though? The nominal wealth? The relative wealth? Whichever metric, where is the point where it goes into "immoral" territory and what is the justification for choosing that point over another?

I'm objecting to the idea, ethically, that a single person can own so much money. 1 billion is far beyond what anyone needs to have a comfortable life.

Whatever the line is, 1 billion is clearly on the other side of it. I'm not interested in sorites paradox-ing the question beyond that.

That's alright because most billionaires don't have that much money, they have wealth, which isn't really the same.

Also there's probably lots of billionaires here in Indonesia, where 1B IDR is only $67k USD. Do you object to Indonesian billionaires as well? Or does it only matter if you're a billionaire in USD? What if I'm a billionaire in GBP?

Do you really believe that everyone on earth should only be allowed to have exactly what is needed to "have a comfortable life" (which definition of comfortable we're following seems like another quandary that we'll ignore for the moment) and nothing more?

Of course I'm referring to USD billionaires.

Yes, in general I think people shouldn't have more wealth than is needed to live a comfortable life, for some reasonable definition of comfortable. I'm not a communist -- I don't want everyone to have exactly the same level of wealth or anything like that. I think it's great that people are rewarded for pro-social activities (though capitalism has a very narrow definition of pro-social).

As I said before, I'm uninterested in sorites paradoxes.

I think the fundamental issue with your philosophy is that by focusing on people that "have too much" instead of primarily worrying about people having too little, you will end up in a situation where you actually have a harder time solving the latter because people don't bother to strive for the former.

Your viewpoint is a pretty standard neoliberal one. Personally I consider the existence of such massive inequality to in and of itself be a problem, separate from but related to the problem of poverty.

Which I must admit (to me) is a patently absurd viewpoint, and probably the entire source of our disagreement.

It is a moral issue when someone has great excess that could be redistributed to people who are not yet at the "comfortable life" standard (whatever has been agreed upon). However, if everyone is already at the comfortable life standard, what could possibly be your justification for saying that one guy having more than another is still immoral?

Earlier you said "I don't want everyone to have exactly the same level of wealth or anything like that", but honestly it sounds like you do. If your moral basis isn't "we need to fix poverty" but rather "delta bad", then your ideal must be for everyone to have the same, anything else is internally inconsistent.

And I will point out that despite the other half of your protestation ("I'm not a communist"), this is an unfortunate trait you share with most communist regimes of history – more interested in the "eat the rich" part than the "feed the poor" part.

You need a moat. Often that moat requires some questionable ethics to build.