patrick.net

I think a windfall would give me the freedom to pursue dreams. I would first be sure my family was provided for: bigger house, newer cars maybe too. Then I would send my wife back to school for her PhD so she can be a full professor somewhere as that's her dream, and I'd join her in going back to school. My dream job is creative writing professor (part time), the other half of the time set aside for writing my own novels.
The rest of my time would be spent with my kids. My current job keeps me at work much too often, and they don't get the attention I'd like to give them.

You've got to fill your life up with something, after all.

Peter P says

Dan8267 says

Employees produce wealth. Owners siphon wealth.

Better be evil than poor. :-)

Since you've let slip that you work or have worked at hedge funds, I expect that you've worked with a lot of ethically questionable people who like to spout grand-sounding (or shocking) sayings about life and people. I suspect that you're not actually like this, but find it amusing to regurgitate the more shocking, heartless, and ruthless quotes here as a sort of "test run." Both a test of their general reception in a forum not dominated by sociopaths, and as a test of your own feelings that resonate.

Peter P says

Not just MBA. Every politically savvy employee engages in empire-building. You want people you understand (aka have dirt on). Organizations do not emerge out of altruism or competence.

Yes, that's generally the case but here's the added value here ... MCs (management consultants) w/ MBAs, loop through countless firms, basically the entire fortune 1000 (or 5000) and thus, have a web of cronies coast-to-coast. This makes it a lot easier for them to bounce about. Think about it, Lou Gerstner went from McKinsey consulting to exec VP of American Express, before becoming CEOs of both Nabisco and IBM. Those are four distinct industry categories.

Dan8267 says

However, the bigger picture is that the owning class, often referred to by the euphemisms entrepreneurs , do 0% of the work and more importantly produce 0% of the wealth while taking 80% of the wealth produced by everyone else.

Dan8267 says

owner of large businesses who make their money not from producing wealth or even from being necessary overhead, but rather from exploiting the workers and siphoning off the wealth they create.

Yes, owners of capital can do that. The founders of this hedge fund were ex-Wall Street ppl, who had access to some big clients' capitals and thus, this firm was founded. My pals and I, who'd developed the prop trading tools, however, did a lot of work to get the airplane to launch successfully. Fortunately, being in the starting dozen, we have bronze/silver exit packages so it's not so bad, as it would have been, had we grown to a few hundred employees and then, we'd be doing work for straight salary only, being latter hires.

thunderlips11 says

Dan8267 says

The fact is that the makers could live easily without you parasites, but you parasites would starve to death without the makers.

Exactly. Ayn Rand's big mistake was that she got the parasites and the producers reversed.

In fact, the very scenario the comic you posted illustrates has actually happened, more or less, during the Middle Ages. When the Black Death killed off a quarter to a third of the peasants, the owner class, called aristocrats back then, found out that there were too few workers to farm all the fields. That is, there were too few wealth producers to produce all the wealth the economy had been producing.

Of course, the owner class didn't resort to tilling their own fields or actually producing wealth themselves because there were still the majority of workers left. But despite many attempts to hold down wages by law, the owner class was forced to raise wages of the workers. The result was the Renaissance and the emergence of Europe out of the economic, social, and political depression it has been in since the fall of Rome.

Of course, what is a wage? It is a euphemism for the part of a worker's wealth production that he or she is allowed to keep after being taxed by parasitic owners. The workers in Medieval Europe had always been producing four times as much wealth as they got to take home, but until the Black Death, the workers weren't able to take home even half the wealth they were producing. Today is no different. Workers produce far more wealth than they take home because the owner class taxes the actual wealth producers 70% to 90% of their production for the privilege or working.

If ever we were to replace the system designed to serve parasites with one that rewarded actual productivity, our GDP would increase over 10 fold and things like welfare and Social Security would be almost completely unnecessary and would shrink to almost nothing as a result.

Conservatives love to lie about capitalism rewarding productivity, but in fact, a system that rewards productivity is the last thing conservatives want because they produce nothing!

Peter P says

Organizations do not emerge out of altruism or competence.

Cooperation is the key to both morality and economic productivity. Systems that allow for greatest cooperation and punish or prevent defection produce the largest wealth in the least time and for the least long-term costs. I.e., they are the best economic systems.

Defection in all its forms including zero-sum games only serve to reduce the wealth production of the entire system. As such, the wealth ill-gotten by the few must be offset with a far more massive lose of wealth by the many. The many should not tolerate this.

Dan8267 says

Cooperation is the key to both morality and economic productivity. Systems that allow for greatest cooperation and punish or prevent defection produce the largest wealth in the least time and for the least long-term costs. I.e., they are the best economic systems.

The goal of all life is to dominate. I don't see how cooperation, as a normative ideal, is compatible with human nature. At best, it'll have to be Survivers kind of competitive-cooperation.

Quigley says

I suspect that you're not actually like this, but find it amusing to regurgitate the more shocking, heartless, and ruthless quotes here as a sort of "test run."

I'm also writing a novel with a similar theme.

Unless your windfall is enough to live in Caligulan splendor, you still need to work.