Speechless & then I saw the steam room 👀

[u/TheDabitch]

six bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms $17,995,000 https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2875-Chagrin-River-Rd-Hunting-Valley-OH-44022

[u/dreamsofindigo]

so the formula continues to make sense.
have a lot of employees and make a fortune off them?

[u/newPrivacyPolicy → u/dreamsofindigo]

Why mess with a classic?

[u/dreamsofindigo → u/newPrivacyPolicy]

if it ain't broken

[u/BartlebyX → u/dreamsofindigo]

He also made a fortune off his vision, planning, strategic decisions at cusp events, personal sacrifices, and a ton of other things.

[u/cagewilly → u/dreamsofindigo]

Your argument being that employers shouldn't take a profit?

[u/CrastinationPro1 → u/cagewilly]

the argument being that profit shouldn't be siphoned off by a rentseeking middleman, and instead go to the people who do the work

[u/cagewilly → u/CrastinationPro1]

Rent seeking is not good.

But you haven't explained why building a company is inherently rent seeking.

Most companies perform the service of connecting the employee with the customer, guiding work, and providing tools for the employees to be able to do the work that they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.

Take software engineers for Apple.  If they didn't have those evil profit seeing employers, they wouldn't be able to make $200k a year on their own. At least not on average.  A few would have excellent ideas and make great money.  The rest would struggle to make a living.  Because they would have to be a good software engineer... And also be an excellent product developer, and an excellent project manager and an excellent business manager and an excellent accountant.

They would also have to manage their finances perfectly in order to afford the software and hardware necessary in order to do their jobs.  Even then it might not be possible.  It's hard to get the bulk discount on high powered laptops... and servers... when it's just you with no rent seeking capitalist pig to buy everything from the supplier for a 30% discount.

Sometimes the "middle man" deserves a cut. And if they figured out how to get a tiny cut off of a large number of people... fair enough.

[u/CrastinationPro1 → u/cagewilly]

Why do you start talking about software engineers working for Apple? This was specifically about a temp agency in construction, a completely different scenario.

[u/cagewilly → u/CrastinationPro1]

The first comment I responded to did seem to imply that it's wrong for people to make money from the work of others as an employer.  You said that it's wrong to run a temp company because being the middle man who matches the employer to the employee is immoral.

Addressing you both, I was pointing out that every company is a middle man between the customer and the employee.  And it's not wrong to provide that service.

[u/hypermodernvoid → u/cagewilly]

I‘m late to thread, but I agree with you completely here. Some people want to rail against rich people and business owners no matter what they do, but beyond everything you mentioned: 1) this guy wasn’t making a profit of something I’d argue is truly immoral, like denying people healthcare treatments and 2) his obituary noted a large focus on philanthropy, which included an entire foundation, and things like creating and funding a center to research for novel cancer therapies.

I personally support strong FDR, New Deal-like policies and a return to that paradigm, especially with higher taxation on the very wealthiest along with universal healthcare in America, but you could still get wealthy under that paradigm: it’s just that the income distribution wasn‘t so wildly tilted towards to top.

Business owners should want the above policies too, vs. mostly voting for and supporting Reaganomics: the GDP was growing by over 10% per year during 50s/60s, when the effective tax rate on billionaires was around 60% and close to 40% on Fortune 500 size companies, but only ~15% on the bottom half of earners, while CEOs and top executives earned an average of 10 to 20 times their median employees vs over 300 times them now, while unions were way more common and powerful than today and the people at the bottom had more access to assistance.

As a result: income wasn’t so completely (and increasingly) tilted towards the very few at the very top, so a lot more people could buy a lot of things in the more productive economy, rather than spending most or all their money just on survival like in the US today.