The Megacoat maker you operate is a $100K machine. It can make 1 million coats in it’s lifetime of 5 years. Break the cost down, it’ll be an operating cost of $.10 per coat before it’s just a heap of scrap that needs replacement.
Cost so far, $10.10 per coat.
You make $20 per coat as your wage. You work for 10 hrs. You make 50 coats.
Cost so far, $30.10 per coat. You make 50 coats per day of work, you work 5 days a week.
You make $1000 a week making 50 coats that sell for $50 each. So $2500 in value is created by your work every day working with the Megacoat maker.
You make $12,500 in value every week.
You also have 19 other employees, doing various styles of Linen coats, with their own Megacoat Makers, that also sell for $50 each.
20 employees are making 50 coats a day. 1000 coats each day at $50. $50,000 in value made every day.
$250,000 made every week.
$13 Million made every year. Off of work you did, which you took home $52,000.
Employee wages across all the coat makers is only $1,040,000.
So $12 million remain to pay executives, rent that hasnt been accounted for, advertising to justify forcing you to increase output from 50 coats to 65, and to hire new people at $15 per coat instead of $20.
Then they outsource it to a different company with negotiated rates of $.10 per coat, $.25 per yard of Linen, operating the same machines, 100 employees, and shifts of 10 hrs a day, 6 days a week. The coats sell for $75 now. They make 10,000 a day. They also have a budget line that sells for $25 and they make 40,000 a day.
Or. You pick up a shift at the dick sucking store.
You like it, you hang around and start working 30 hrs a week there.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You are a cashier.
You are asked to sell 300 boblins for $2 with every transaction you make this week. You see no bonus for hitting these numbers.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Go through a really big week at the dick sucking store. 10,000 transactions! You hit the margins for upselling boblins by 2x. Next week they tell you to make 900 in sales for boblins at the register.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Dry week at the dick sucking store. Bad weather, no one wants to be out. 200 transactions! You had no hope of hitting those numbers. You’re told it’s your fault. You do not control the weather.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re moved to stocking, you do the rotations to make sure product is readily available. You’re on your feet all day. The new Boblin’s out, but your store only got 3 boxes, they sold out in the hour. People come in just to look for them. They yell at you like you have any control over quantities.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re promoted to shift supervisor. You have responsibilities to run the store. They’ll talk to District about getting you that raise. Yes, backpaid.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
An old lady took a dump in the aisle.
Your boss thinks he saw an old black woman steal a tin of cookies and called the cops, 6 officers showed up.
You’re working during a robbery. You’ve been held at gun point. You’re told you should always comply. They will still yell at you anyway.
You're a cobbler, and on a good day you can cobble together $40 worth of leather into a $60 pair of shoes every hour. That means you are making $20 profit every hour. This is post-taxes, because we live in a libertarian wonderland now and taxes are a thing of the past.
The capitalist can supply the raw materials and pay them $10/hr, so that the capitalist makes $10 profit.
At first it might seem like the capitalist has the shittier gig, right? WRONG. Check this out.
After a while of exploiting his worker, the capitalist will have enough money to buy two sets of raw materials at once, and then hire two workers to construct shoes for him. Now he's making $20 profit every hour, and will be able to afford a third employee is half the amount of time as it took to get his second employee.
Now, you, the cobbler, see this happening and want to try it for yourself. So you spend a few weeks eschewing the almond milk caramel frapachinos every day, and soon you've got enough money to buy two sets of leather raw materials too. You go an do that, and then things start to get kind of confusing (lets just say you're not the brightest cobbler in town), you saw the capitalist hire two workers, so you go and construct two sets of shoes, which takes two hours, and you realize you're still just making $20 profit an hour. An idea pops into your head, "Eureka!" you guy and buy two sets of leather supplies again, an d this time you use both sets to build a set of a shoes, but those shoes turn out to be REALLY big, far too big for anyone to wear. Now you're out $80 raw materials, have no cash on hand left, so you sigh and sign up for a job at the capitalist's factory, where you'll only be making half of what your used to make.
The moral of the story is that regular everyday normal working people and more or less limited by a linear rate of profit.. On the other hand, fat cat ghouls like the capitalist can keep hiring more and more workers as their profits get larger and larger. In an idealized setting, the capitalist is only limited by an exponential rate of profit. No matter how hard the worker works, they will never have anywhere close to the amount of money the capitalist has, because their relationships with money are fundamentally different. Undisturbed, wealth inequality will grow in a n unbounded fashion until the gini index looks like an ideal laughter laffer curve.
To keep the metaphors dumb, because the Capitalist Boss can hire another employee to increase output, instead you the lone shoemaker, having to either work harder to make more shoes per hour to increase your margins, or use cheaper materials, realize you can't increase the amount of money you can make in the same way.
Because the capitalist didnt make his money skimming off of one person's work. It's everyone involved in the making of the shoes. Or Coats. The Capitalist didn't add $19.90 to the cost of the making of a coat. The coat, by the rules of Liberal Economics, should cost $30.10 because of the amount of work that went into it.
Okay, you make coats.
Linen costs $5 a yard.
The coats cost $50, and take up 2 yards of Linen.
Cost so far, $10 per coat.
The Megacoat maker you operate is a $100K machine. It can make 1 million coats in it’s lifetime of 5 years. Break the cost down, it’ll be an operating cost of $.10 per coat before it’s just a heap of scrap that needs replacement.
Cost so far, $10.10 per coat.
You make $20 per coat as your wage. You work for 10 hrs. You make 50 coats.
Cost so far, $30.10 per coat. You make 50 coats per day of work, you work 5 days a week.
You make $1000 a week making 50 coats that sell for $50 each. So $2500 in value is created by your work every day working with the Megacoat maker. You make $12,500 in value every week.
You also have 19 other employees, doing various styles of Linen coats, with their own Megacoat Makers, that also sell for $50 each.
20 employees are making 50 coats a day. 1000 coats each day at $50. $50,000 in value made every day.
$250,000 made every week.
$13 Million made every year. Off of work you did, which you took home $52,000.
Employee wages across all the coat makers is only $1,040,000.
So $12 million remain to pay executives, rent that hasnt been accounted for, advertising to justify forcing you to increase output from 50 coats to 65, and to hire new people at $15 per coat instead of $20.
Then they outsource it to a different company with negotiated rates of $.10 per coat, $.25 per yard of Linen, operating the same machines, 100 employees, and shifts of 10 hrs a day, 6 days a week. The coats sell for $75 now. They make 10,000 a day. They also have a budget line that sells for $25 and they make 40,000 a day.
And they tell you hard work pays off.
Or. You pick up a shift at the dick sucking store.
You like it, you hang around and start working 30 hrs a week there.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You are a cashier.
You are asked to sell 300 boblins for $2 with every transaction you make this week. You see no bonus for hitting these numbers.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Go through a really big week at the dick sucking store. 10,000 transactions! You hit the margins for upselling boblins by 2x. Next week they tell you to make 900 in sales for boblins at the register.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Dry week at the dick sucking store. Bad weather, no one wants to be out. 200 transactions! You had no hope of hitting those numbers. You’re told it’s your fault. You do not control the weather.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re moved to stocking, you do the rotations to make sure product is readily available. You’re on your feet all day. The new Boblin’s out, but your store only got 3 boxes, they sold out in the hour. People come in just to look for them. They yell at you like you have any control over quantities.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re promoted to shift supervisor. You have responsibilities to run the store. They’ll talk to District about getting you that raise. Yes, backpaid.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
An old lady took a dump in the aisle.
Your boss thinks he saw an old black woman steal a tin of cookies and called the cops, 6 officers showed up.
You’re working during a robbery. You’ve been held at gun point. You’re told you should always comply. They will still yell at you anyway.
You made over $100M in sales this past year.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
I usually also suppliment with this example.
You're a cobbler, and on a good day you can cobble together $40 worth of leather into a $60 pair of shoes every hour. That means you are making $20 profit every hour. This is post-taxes, because we live in a libertarian wonderland now and taxes are a thing of the past.
The capitalist can supply the raw materials and pay them $10/hr, so that the capitalist makes $10 profit.
At first it might seem like the capitalist has the shittier gig, right? WRONG. Check this out.
After a while of exploiting his worker, the capitalist will have enough money to buy two sets of raw materials at once, and then hire two workers to construct shoes for him. Now he's making $20 profit every hour, and will be able to afford a third employee is half the amount of time as it took to get his second employee.
Now, you, the cobbler, see this happening and want to try it for yourself. So you spend a few weeks eschewing the almond milk caramel frapachinos every day, and soon you've got enough money to buy two sets of leather raw materials too. You go an do that, and then things start to get kind of confusing (lets just say you're not the brightest cobbler in town), you saw the capitalist hire two workers, so you go and construct two sets of shoes, which takes two hours, and you realize you're still just making $20 profit an hour. An idea pops into your head, "Eureka!" you guy and buy two sets of leather supplies again, an d this time you use both sets to build a set of a shoes, but those shoes turn out to be REALLY big, far too big for anyone to wear. Now you're out $80 raw materials, have no cash on hand left, so you sigh and sign up for a job at the capitalist's factory, where you'll only be making half of what your used to make.
The moral of the story is that regular everyday normal working people and more or less limited by a linear rate of profit.. On the other hand, fat cat ghouls like the capitalist can keep hiring more and more workers as their profits get larger and larger. In an idealized setting, the capitalist is only limited by an exponential rate of profit. No matter how hard the worker works, they will never have anywhere close to the amount of money the capitalist has, because their relationships with money are fundamentally different. Undisturbed, wealth inequality will grow in a n unbounded fashion until the gini index looks like an ideal
laughterlaffer curve.To keep the metaphors dumb, because the Capitalist Boss can hire another employee to increase output, instead you the lone shoemaker, having to either work harder to make more shoes per hour to increase your margins, or use cheaper materials, realize you can't increase the amount of money you can make in the same way.
Because the capitalist didnt make his money skimming off of one person's work. It's everyone involved in the making of the shoes. Or Coats. The Capitalist didn't add $19.90 to the cost of the making of a coat. The coat, by the rules of Liberal Economics, should cost $30.10 because of the amount of work that went into it.