When you start to decouple the ideas that money & property are the be-all and end-all of everything, capitalism as it exists these days really starts to seem awfully misguided.
But even if you don’t do that, and you just believe in the idea that “hard work bears fruit,” then it still seems awfully misguided and certainly terribly unfair.
Consider that in any large corporation, by far most of the work is done by the employees, often lower-level employees. The CEO, presidents, and vice presidents make up an absolutely tiny portion of the workforce and their contributions, while important, are almost negligible compared to what everyone else in the company contributes. Yet we pay these few people far more than all the employees – often unimaginably more. How is that fair? How does that jive with the idea that “hard work bears fruit?” The people who work the hardest are arguably paid the least!
And then there’s the shareholders of the company – the ones who do no work at all, those shiftless, lazy, layabouts! They do nothing but profit from other people’s work – how in the world is that OK, and why do we consider that to be the “American way?”
If you sit around and collect money from the government, you’re a worthless, lazy, dead-weight on society – but if you sit around and collect money from other people’s labor, you’re a valuable, important, contributor to society?
