by martin-t | 2025-10-29 00:44:05+00:00
> under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal".

Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.

Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.

Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?

- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.

- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.

- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.

These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.

> the complexity is in the implementation

No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.

With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.

> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).

Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.

> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?

The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.

The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.

> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?

The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.

A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.

Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.