I don't know about the tiresome "socialism vs. capitalism" standbys, but it seems apparent that production (laborers) have created a vast amount of wealth that is inappropriately confiscated by firms. Wages should increase so that the source of the profits (laborers) are equitably compensated for their success and productivity.
Workers are everything and the source of all capital.
Tell that to Bill Gates. He (and his employees) obviously needs your valuable insight.
Bill gates counts as a 'worker' when he actually added value to something; he long since ceased being one, and turn to financial piracy instead to maintain a market monopoly over a set of technical innovations invented by others. In any case, without the American government paying for the expenses of research and development, he would never had an industry to play in in the first place.
Gates is fond of suing and/or intimidating smaller firms with 'patent suits' and the like, knowing new firms can't afford toe legal expenses, regardless of the merits of the suits. He's not alone in this tactic. A large reason why the motherboard industry and other computer related industries off-shored was because of the Intel-MS cartel doing this. Apple is no prize either; Jobs and co. did, and still do, the exact same type of harassment and legal extortions.
This has more to do with the patent system, which I am in favor of getting rid of.
But since we have a patent system, you have no right to complain about someone defending their own patents. Especially since if you held the patent, and had the money to defend it, you absolutely would do so yourself. You are lying to claim otherwise.
Remember, the way that the system works as it is, is that if you do not defend your patent, then you can't defend it at all.
If someone does something relatively similar, and you do not defend your patent, then if someone directly rips off your patent, when you go to court, they'll point out that you didn't have problem with the previous guy, and that will cause you to lose the case.
So the way the system is setup, it encourages lawsuit and litigation of all patent infringements, small and large. I suggest the system needs reformed, but given the current system, I don't blame people for doing what they must to defend their property under the current system.
That said...
Whether or not Gates "counts" as a worker or not, doesn't matter. And owning property is not "financial piracy" anymore than renting out your spare bedroom is "financial piracy".
Also, about off shoring.
Whether you like it or not, foriegn companies are going to build stuff. When they do, and they find cheaper methods of doing it, that is going to put market pressure on the computer companies. In fact, just having more supply alone, will drive down prices.
Market supply of motherboards in a global market goes up.... price of motherboards goes down.
When the price drops, you can't afford to pay the expensive wages anymore. Economics 101.
So what do you do? Keep paying them, and go out of business? Or move off shore where the cost of production is lower? Answer... off shore. My company just did this. Just last year. We had a product that simply was not going to sell at a high price. Result? We had to sign a contract with a Chinese company to build the product. The other option was to simply not sell the product.
Which would you suggest?
If you want stuff to be built here in the US, with US labor... the way to get that to happen, is to make investment in the US profitable. Cut taxes. Cut regulations. Cut the minimum wage. Cut the costly mandates. Everything you do, that makes it more profitable to build stuff here, will cause more stuff to be built here. There will never be a time, where you can tax the snot out of companies, regulate the snot out of companies, and magically have them want to invest here. That shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp.
Lastly, it really really bugs me when people complain that government paying for innovation and research.
Because it's not us on the right-wing that are pushing government grants, and research grants, and all this crap.
A bunch of left-winger running around demanding funding for green-energy research, and everything else, and then a lefty comes on here and complain that someone is taking advantage of the research they demanded be funded?
Look.... if you demand government fund the research, then get used to someone taking advantage of it. Now perhaps you specifically did not demand it.... but the leftists did. I'm tired of leftists complaining about the results of the policies they themselves push.
Years ago I was working for a company, and the CEO got up and was talking about a project to build a power supply system specifically for Hybrid Busses. This was 2008. In 2009, we had another company meeting, and the Hybrid Bus system was put on indefinite hold. I ask why. The CEO explained that given recent changes in government, the company determined they could get the government to fund them with Grants, because the power supply was deemed "renewable energy" related.
Now understand what just happened..... We *WERE* going to fund this project with our own money. But we *DID NOT* because the government was going to pay for it. *THE LEFT* created a system where we didn't have to pay for our own research to design our own product.
I'm sure if some leftard on the internet had known about it, they would have said "without the American government paying for the expenses of research and development, (we) would never had an industry to play in in the first place."
Well you are wrong. We would have invested in, and made the product ourselves. We didn't because the leftists in the government offered to pay for it. Now you want to complain we're getting rich off of the stupidity of paying for our research? That's on you, not us.
