"You can't miss what you never had"
Seeing an exact number of how much is taken from your wages via taxes every time you get paid hits different than an imaginary amount of your contribution to the whole.
Just because no one gives you the number doesn't make it imaginary. It's just kept from you by the person who profits off your labour.
Perhaps because people aren't aware of the big one?
And because it can't be really measured at all for many jobs. What's the economic value created by someone in customer support? What's the value created by a janitor? A dish washer?
Most jobs are not directly generating revenue out of nothing. Only the company as a whole does and it cannot be mathematically calculated who generates what share. In communism, you'd probably argue that everyone is equally important and thus earnings should be distributed linearly.
But if you tell people that everyone should make the same no matter if it's room keeping or an engineer, they mostly get upset. Because they derserve better than those dumb, lazy fuckers who didn't even go to school blahblahblah. They rather fight those below their own socioeconomic status and dream of their breakthrough and becoming a millionaire themselves. People are often egoistic unfortunately.
An hour of labor is an hour of labor. Labor that requires more labor to replicate is compressed labor.
Additionally, the concept of Communism being "everyone gets paid the same" goes directly against Marx and the very foundations of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs:"
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
-Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
Read Wage Labor and Capital and follow it with Value, Price and Profit if you want to really understand what Marxists believe. They go in-depth on what constitutes Value by Labor.
But if you tell people that everyone should make the same no matter if it's room keeping or an engineer, they mostly get upset. Because **they** derserve better than those dumb, lazy fuckers who didn't even go to school blahblahblah
That’s a pretty uncharitable take. Whether people get upset or not is irrelevant. What matters is what people’s incentives are and how they respond to them.
If you pay janitors the same as engineers then no one will bother going to school to study engineering. The whole incentive structure of your economy evaporates, leading to collapse.
The US GDP is over $145,000 per person employed.
Median wage is less than half of that. Where is all the value going??
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD?locations=US
Mean, not median, would probably make more sense?
Value presumably goes to small number of people, and to value of various companies.
I think that's partly to show the point, median is a lower than something equivalent to mean, indicating the high skewess of the distribution.
The gdp vs wage angle is adding another point about about unearned income, rent and interest. I'd be slightly worried at not provisioning for fixed capital stock formation out of GDP - you do want to produce some of that stuff was well as consumption.
Of course you can argue about who is best placed to own the capital too - as well as how the fk it can be measured in a market price system. (I already see a LTOV comment further down).
I'm not mad because of how much I pay in taxes, I'm mad because of how little I get in return.
If "promote the common Welfare" (I'm in the USA) were taken more seriously then I think the big green blob would largely fix itself.
I would think that that this is generally true when we zoom into a local economy. But is this true when we consider a global scale? If we were distribute the world's wealth to people in proportion to the value generated by their labor, what would the spread be like?
Does a worker in the US or a wealthy EU country receive less than the economic value/profit that they produce when we spread value fairly across the international supply chain? I suspect that workers in rich countries are able to receive more than their "fair share" for their labor by benefiting from their country's exploitation of resources and labor in poorer nations.
I am not stating this as fact. It is what I suspect, but I don't know the numbers, and I am curious to learn what others think.
A certain someone wrote a book about this international evolution of Capitalism.
