In other words, own productive capital and live off the rent it generates. Personally I think such capital should be owned by the workers at a business so that they don’t have parasitic individuals like the author to support. It’s nice for you if you have a lot of wealth and don’t have to work, but the rest of us pay the price of that, and only a tiny slice of society can ever live that way, for obvious reasons.
The "freedom" the article author is speaking of is the freedom to leech off the labour of others. I agree, it's disgusting. If you are willing and able there should be no free lunch -- and the rich are the ones who leech the most out of society.
Ironic that they criticize those who have worse outcomes for not working hard enough or focusing on the wrong things when it is those poor people who are working the hardest.
Here's an airline pilot. They're not being paid for the full value they produce, because some of it is going to pay of capital owners. And why should they receive some of the money? Because they put up the 70 million dollars to buy the airplane. The pilot didn't have that kind of money. And why does the plane cost that much? Because there are 150,000 people at Boeing who also want to be paid for the value that they produce.
You seem to want those with capital to invest it in companies for no return. That's... not likely to happen with the humans we have now. If you want the tools, and you or your company don't have the money to buy them yourself, then you have to make it worthwhile for the people who do have the money.
I’m not going to dismiss this concern out of hand because I feel like it’s a good faith argument. But perhaps we can think a bit farther outside the box. Now, capital is always going to be required for economic activity to take place. Agreed. But I don’t think that whoever manages the allocation of capital needs to be compensated above and beyond what any other laborer doing an equivalently technical job needs to make. And they should be paid for the labor, not for the leverage they have as owners of capital.
How that is to be accomplished is.. complex. But that’s definitely the goal. But let’s not assume that we need some class of people who have the privilege of being the owners of capital.
Here's a tool that increases productivity. There are three people who need to get paid: the tool maker, the one who buys the tool, and the worker who knows how to use the tool. (The worker should be more productive with the tool, and therefore worth more than the worker who does not know how to use the tool.)
If you're saying that the one who bought the tool and the worker who uses the tool should profit equally from the tool, I might agree with that. (I'm not sure; I'd have to think about it some more, but it's not a clearly wrong position.)
Now here's someone richer than that. He buys two of the tools. If you say he should get as much as the worker for the first tool, and as much as the worker for the second tool, again I might agree. If you say he only gets as much as any one worker, no matter how many tools he buys, I disagree. I even think that you should disagree, for selfish reasons. We need these people to buy the tools for the overall growth of productivity. If we have to bribe them with returns on their investment, so be it. (The alternative is that the rich person only buys one tool, and then stops, because they would get nothing from buying the second tool. That may feel good, in that it doesn't let the rich earn more than anyone else, but it doesn't help grow the economy. And growing the economy is the only way that there's actually more for people, as opposed to simply dividing the existing pie in a different way.)
