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How do people justify earning more than others? cartesiandaemon April 29 2016, 14:05:05 UTC
I've been trying to think about what people "deserve", in the context of socialism, capitalism, and how society ought to be ordered.

People deserve more if they need it (eg. if you're paralysed from the neck down and need 24/7 care, you should be paid that money, even if it's from the government not your employer directly, whether or not you would earn enough to afford that otherwise). If you're a child, or a parent of a child, who is too young to work, you deserve support.

If they accept long working hours, or unpleasant working environment, high risk, etc in exchange for money, that also is well deserved.

If you engineer and/or take advantage of monopoly, or extract money from other people by deception, or otherwise manipulate the system, you probably *don't* deserve what you extract.

The cases that people don't mostly have agreement on, seem to be:

1. If you have skills which are more in demand.
2. If you create an organisation which is now widely valuable, but it's impossible to prove how much you got lucky and how much you nursed it into existence and how much you're the only person to run it now.
3. If the job has "perks" which are hard to quantify how much they're necessary for the job and how much they're implicit compensation.

But I'm not sure how society *should* be arranged.

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