alt Hacker NewsYes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.
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You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?
The word "create" is too fuzzy here. If the thing that your company is selling wouldn't exist if you hadn't started the company, did you not "create" it?
It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market operated. Profits only come from exchange. It is more accurate to say profits are given than extracted.
The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
> Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone
Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...
(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)
What you are describing is exploitation. And to be fair, you probably also mean exploitation. I’ve never really understood the distinction, nor do I believe there is any meaningful distinction. Externalizing costs is just one of many ways capitalists exploit workers. But externalities doesn’t sound quite as bad so maybe capitalists can justify their obviously evil behavior by using a fancier term for their exploitation against their workers.
> the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create
in common parlance, theft