Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’
I posted this answer:
Absolutely!
When entrepreneurs expend time, energy, and resources to start, build, and run businesses, aspiring workers who fill the jobs these businesspersons create exploit the business for wages and salaries. In doing so, thay drain off sales revenues, cutting deeply into the business profits of the owners.
In the pre-Capitalist era, before wage labor, self-sustaining workers pocketed 100% of their sales revenues as profits. When Capitalism’s free market unleashed society’s most highly visionary, motivated, and productive workers—the economy’s Prime Movers, the people whom Karl Marx and his followers deny exist—the explosion of wage-paying jobs they created cut those net pre-tax profit margins from 100% down to today’s average of around 10%.
The result of the rise of advanced industry under Capitalism was the explosion of exploitation by wage labor of the capitalist business Prime Movers. So, yes, Capitalism is most assuredly based on the exploitation of others.
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I offer this answer with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Workers, of course, no more exploit business by accepting their wage-paying jobs than business exploits workers by hiring them for wages to contribute to the business’s productive mission, as the fool Karl Marx falsely claimed.
For a more thorough discussion of how this is so, see my answer to the Quora question, “What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour [sic] which produces surplus value? I recommend only positive answers in favour of labour [sic] being a source of value.”
Capitalism, in fact, is the anti-exploitation social system, if by “exploitation” we mean taking unfair advantage of another—because Capitalism is based on equality of moral agency; individual rights (and the corollary respect for the rights of others); trade (win-win relationships, including employment arrangements); the outlawing of private and governmental force except in self-defense (voluntarism); and the rule of objective law under a constitutionally limited government that does nothing else but secures these rights.
Related Reading:
QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'
Marx and His Exploitation Theory BY GEORGE REISMAN
Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand
To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?
Did Unions Create the Middle Class?
1 comment:
Jiminy Crickets. At first I thought you meant all that glop in your first three paragraphs. Craig Biddle pulled the same thing on us several years age, seemingly making a major critique of Objectivism. At first I thought he meant it until it got so bad I realized he had to be kidding. It turned out he was kidding, of course.
I wonder how much of a fool Marx really was, in that I think he had all the facts, except for the moral factor, lined up, then interpretated everything in terms of pseudo-morals. Even there, he might not have been fooled. He might have known those "morals" were anti human life, so, actually immoral and evil, but he deliberately wrote as he wrote, thinking more than enough people would be fooled to drag everybody back into the dark ages.
Today some people who know better are still trying to fool enough people. The only reason they might be fooling themselves is in thinking they will succeed.
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