> Deciding "worthless" is up to the person paying them.
Exactly. Arguing that capitalism is "freedom" is doublespeak, particularly against anarchism advocates like David Graeber. When you must obey a boss's commands all day, your opinion is unimportant; the boss decides what your time is worth. You are the boss's rented instrument, regardless whether you think the work is useless or harmful. Under management's watchful eye, there's no free speech at work; so you'd better not discuss with your coworkers.
Exactly why people want to redistribute power more equally, just as in the ages of kings, slaveowners, totalitarian parties, top-down fake democracies, etc.
There's no 'must' obey a boss's commands all day. You're free to do whatever you want; you must only follow your boss's commands if you want him to pay you. And if you think he should pay you when he doesn't want to, then you're making the implicit value judgement that he should act how you want him to, not how he wants to, which seems rather arrogant.
If one wants to consume food, resources etc. produced by other people, one has to be willing to offer something back.
There is no way of 'redistributing power more equally': you will always answer to someone. In the case of any political system which pretends to 'redistribute' a given thing, then the person you answer to is the redistributor. Any philosophy which pretends it can halt ambition and greed is nothing more than a utopian philosophy, and any philosophy which relies upon a central authority to enforce fairness must first answer how it will halt that authority's ambition and greed.
McDonald's provides an entrepreneur all the equipment, infrastructure, consumables, staff, even customer base - all one has to do is show up, flip burgers, and earn $8/hr. Of course there are rules to using all of those resources, and McD's stockholders get a cut (hey, they're providing all that stuff); if you don't like it, you can leave.
You can't "redistribute power more equally". Most people don't, in reality, want it: they refuse the responsibilities that come with ownership & liability, hence they get less of the revenue. Most people don't want equal distribution of power, they want to receive more wealth without earning it.
Lots of projection there. More likely, lots of folks have not got the skills to take more power. Just giving it to them will end disastrously. There's a famous case of a Socialist who was a wealthy scion of a manufacturing family. He inheirited, gave the factory to the workers and went on the road as a Socialism shill. A year later the factory went broke. This is curiously used as an endorsement of Socialism somehow, or at least of this guy's commitment.
What I learned from that is, without training the workers should not normally be entrusted with power. It's in nobody's best interest.
Poverty functions in a similar way. On the one hand it's not an unfair assessment that poor people make poor choices, need constant supervision, and cannot be left in charge (which is often something I find I'm often afraid to say among more left-leaning individuals). On the other hand you can't really blame the poor for that, and the cycle of poverty can be broken with a combination of education and opportunity, perhaps only over multiple generations.
What you do with this information, I suppose, depends on your political leanings. You can emphasize either side of the story, and be sort of correct.
Exactly. Arguing that capitalism is "freedom" is doublespeak, particularly against anarchism advocates like David Graeber. When you must obey a boss's commands all day, your opinion is unimportant; the boss decides what your time is worth. You are the boss's rented instrument, regardless whether you think the work is useless or harmful. Under management's watchful eye, there's no free speech at work; so you'd better not discuss with your coworkers.
Exactly why people want to redistribute power more equally, just as in the ages of kings, slaveowners, totalitarian parties, top-down fake democracies, etc.