Because people start off with nothing essentially. And the statement on abundance is the same exact fallacy as Marx. Although to be fair it predated him in far /worse/ forms like many "thinkers" in Ancient Greece thinking conquest was the only way to obtain more wealth. They thought that if someone managed to conquer and enslave the entire world they wouldn't build any more wealth over time. Medieval economic philosophy had a denialism that merchants could be generating value without fraud because they presumed universal values of good. While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality.
Hunter gatherers have little social stratification but no real wealth inequality because they are limited to what they can carry personally and cooperative health is what keeps them alive. It takes a /lot/ of skill and knowledge to live on one's own in the wilderness without advanced tools like say a steel knife.
Productivity is what creates wealth in a meaningful sense. It can improve and boost living standards per person without a specialized pyramid scheme of labor. Proof? The fact that industrialized societies aren't over 90% farmers and haven't starved to death!
While raw inputs may come from land processing it is where the bulk of value actually comes from. If I gave you a claim to all of the gold in Antarctica it would be of very little value because of the extraction expenses.
"Because people start off with nothing essentially"
I do not believe this. In a world without private property, everyone is entitled to the world's land. Everyone has everything available to them. People survive off the land. Eventually these people don't want to just survive, so they begin to do a single thing all day (hunting, gathering, eventually farming) They trade the output of their labor (their wages of berries, food) for other peoples output.
The introduction of private property allows for some people to collect rent on productivity, without actually being productive. Private property is a tax on productivity and rent will always consume any excess production value.
Progress drives poverty, as well as any inequality in wealth only increasing as time goes on in a positive feedback loop.
"While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality."
I don't believe this either. I believe any rent-seeking is adverse to progress towards eliminating poverty. I see it as a failure of society to allow for the upper class to enjoy greater pleasures as time goes on at the expense of those born poor.
We are all guests on a floating spaceship rocketing through space. The idea of inheritance has no place in a free market in my opinion, it should be taxed as income for the recipient. Inheritance is the vessel through which wage equality is growing larger, in my opinion.
>Because people start off with nothing essentially.
This is disputed by figures as diverse as Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel and Rousseau. It is not fact at least as presented here without discussion.
>While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality.
The theory of exploitation in Marx or post-Marx (even without the LTV) does not depend on the assumption that capitalists cannot add value. I'd suggest looking at the work of John Roemer and his work on PECP and CECP.
>It can improve and boost living standards per person without a specialized pyramid scheme of labor.
Was this ever cast in doubt? I'd also caution the application of a historical example to the society of today, since the applicability of the principle has not been proven.
>While raw inputs may come from land processing it is where the bulk of value actually comes from.
Without private property, you'd be subsistence farming and fighting off anyone stronger than you that wanted your land (since it wouldn't be privately owned).
How is labor being misappropriated if it's creating productivity?
"Humans have never made a single new thing, at least as far as I know. "
You're typing this on a phone or computer connected to the internet.
"The purchasing of people for labor has long been out of style"
What is the alternative to this that you think is in style?
The phone I (could) be typing this on, was made out of the earth, not from anything humans created. Anything with value is land that had labor applied to it.
The alternative to purchasing people for labor has been wages, which is giving back to a laborer the portion of their labor which is not stolen from them.
Marx of course came up with these ideas, and much of the 20th century was filled with the unimaginable horror that the people of the world suffered as leaders such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol-Pot, to name of few, implemented them on a national scale.
I am totally unconvinced that any leader seduced by Marx would ever be someone I would care to live under.
He didn't come up with it on his own - it was based on previous fallacies which also caused millennia of suffering. Bad economics taken seriously does that in general - many wars were fought under the gold standard to boost the effective economic cap imposed by deflation.
Falling for a model of thinking is certainly a sign of a poor leader.
I'm totally convinced that any leader seduced by Marx would be someone I would not care to live under.
Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice.
If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale.
So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible).
The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.
How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use.
I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)
