Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.
He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.
The view you have of “profit” is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is “taught” about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.
🤷♂️ I don’t expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn’t, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.
Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.
He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.
The view you have of “profit” is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is “taught” about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.
🤷♂️ I don’t expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn’t, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.