For instance I know some lawyers and insurance CEOs who built the company themselves and run an ethical business model but because of innovation have made a ton of money. One lawyer has made a name for himself only defending those who have been hurt my big corporations and their life is ruined. The other made an insurance model that helps these hurt people invest their court winnings into annuities to guarantee they’re financially taken care of for life. These are not billionaires but both companies have won for their clients/work with hundreds of millions if not billions.

How can one clearly define someone like Musk or Bezos as bourgeois whereas these hard working individuals who came from nothing and build a huge business actually from nothing and help people?

Hoping for a non-black and white answer. My local MLM group declares everyone evil who isn’t their exact ideology. It doesn’t make sense to apply this thinking when someone whose become rich through helping people isn’t the same as someone whose has taken advantage of people for generations.

Edit: getting downvoted to hell when I am asking a question sure isn’t welcoming.

  • ComradeMiao@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    I think an issue here is that “ethical” and “unethical” as value judgements operate on many different levels and just because someone does something considered one or the other, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are wholly bad or good.

    This is a fair point I considered. That’s why I wondered how to define because it can’t be on an individual basis.

    Could you expand upon how getting paid a high salary is unethical? Does giving a lot to charity make it better?

    • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
      8·
      7 days ago

      A high salary isn’t unethical on it’s own, just like how a small salary isn’t necessarily ethical when it is acquired by unethical means. However, high yet ethical salaries are vanishingly rare because the structure of our economy provides very few opportunities for an individual to create that much value, while the opportunities for extracting that much value from masses of working people abound.

      Capital imposes an iron law of economics: Profit = Income - Expenses. Labor costs are an expense, therefore profits can only be achieved when the workers aren’t fully compensated for the value they’ve created for the company. This generally breaks down two ways, the actual workers who create value and are massively underpaid for it, and the generously-salaried managers who extract that value to finance the shareholders’ dividends.

      Every dollar paid to someone who owns a share of a business is a dollar stolen from someone who works there.

      • ComradeMiao@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        5·
        7 days ago

        So based on what you just said, profit would/should essentially not exist. It should be expenses going towards all workers fairly and the rest put back into the company and means?

        • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
          8·
          6 days ago

          Ideally, yeah.

          There’s no way to make profits that doesn’t exploit the very people who make them possible, and therefore no moral way for shareholders to exist as an economic class. Ownership and it’s demand for perpetual dividends on finite investments can’t ever be anything other than a machine for extracting value from workers.