Comments by "Persona" (@ArawnOfAnnwn) on "How Do Entrepreneurs Really Make Money? (You Will Be Surprised)" video.
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The 'work' that entrepreneurs make that this video is talking about is decision making and negotiation, facilitated by personal connections. When people criticize them for exploitation, they aren't suggesting that they literally do 'nothing', but that the actual manufacturing the product is done by others. Everyone knows the CEO takes decisions and that connections give rise to contracts. That 'work' just seems a whole lot cushier than actually working the factory floor or coding in the office. And yet it gets paid a whole lot more than either.
Secondly, an interesting thing to note about entrepreneurs and risk - the rise of major corporations historically coincided with the invention, by state decree, of the concept of the Limited Liability Company (LLC). Before that, you could still start your own business and even raise funds for it, but if it went bust you stood to lose everything - including your private wealth. There were even what were known as 'debtors prisons' - people jailed not for committing crimes, but simply for not being able to pay back their debts. It is only AFTER those risks were abolished that large private enterprises began to form. Which is ironic, considering how much they're celebrated for taking risks, since that only started when the level of actual risk was substantially reduced. Indeed the MOST RISKY investments even today aren't taken by companies at all, but by the govt., when it invests into fundamental research and long term infrastructure projects. Mariana Mazzucato has written extensively on this.
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@shanep.7184 Sure. But 'how the market economy works' is also why slavery and child labour worked - indeed the defenders of both practices back in the day often used the free market as their main defense of it. It's also why blood diamonds worked. And why fake cures and snake oil salesmen worked. It's also why sweatshops and drug pushing and sex work exploitation work. These are all market phenomena, but that doesn't make them not exploitation. And guess what? Some of them went away, or substantially reduced, when the conditions the market had to operate in changed - usually by way of govt. decree or worker agitation. Markets work in the conditions created for them - those conditions are malleable. The most successful market interventions aren't even seen as interventions today, we just take them for granted. But they are interventions.
As for being indispensable, this is exceptionalist idealism. We will never have a world where every person is their own unique snowflake irreplaceable by anyone else. Indeed if we did we likely wouldn't even be able to accomplish anything. Fungibility isn't just an essential feature of currency, it's also pretty vital for labor too. Companies would be one unexpected quitting or death away from collapse if all their employees were irreplaceable. So would govts. be with their civil servants. No organization can work with nothing but mavericks and savants.
A good system, like a good design, is set up for the average participant, not the outlier. For the mean, median or mode, not the exception. That means ensuring the replaceable workers are compensated. You wouldn't call an education system where most students fail horribly but a few gifted kids top the world a good system, nor a health system that fails to provide good care for the average Joe with a flu but manages to have elite hospitals staffed with the best specialists of all good either. In fact we literally see that in reality - with places like Finland and France ranking way higher than the US in education and health respectively. And yet somehow that kind of philosophy is touted as good practice for the economy? Yeah no. Indeed this is even recognized as the flaw it is - but only when it happens outside the West. Commentators often use the existence of enormously wealthy individuals or families in otherwise poor countries as an avenue to criticize said nations. And yet that kind of discrepancy is what you're championing here for companies. Hell in many cases those people are also similarly unique, with few if anyone else being able to take their place (even if their position isn't based on skill but a myriad of other factors). No, if those states aren't doing right by their people, firms are similarly not doing right by their workers. And, as mentioned above, historically they did even worse - until they had no choice but to do better, whether due to state decree or worker agitation.
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