This railing against company owners and higher paid employees still seems bizarre to me. Even leaving aside the expense vs income generation thing then I am not sure why employees should be mandated to, or expect to, earn proportional to their income generation for a company.
If someone risks the time, money and effort in starting a business and it takes off then seems reasonable that they extract what they can from it, or at least can live handsomely if that is how it rolls.
If someone wants to trade some earning potential for some security and presumably less hassle than managing a business (which is tedious and distracts from getting stuff done) then their risk assessment to make and path to take.
If someone has a rare skill then provided said skill is in demand it will tend to drive up price of said skill until it becomes easier to train yourself up at it, train someone else, build a robot to handle it or do without. This seems obvious.
The reverse (a readily replaceable worker with a line out the door ready to take their place) will tend to see the price others willing to do it go down so they can get at least something, at least until it hits a floor there.
If someone has kids they can't afford (230000 USD to raise a kid to adulthood, possibly more if you are conned into a pointless degree https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-child . Abortions are cheap, condoms are cheaper/free, tubal ligations and vasectomies amortised over instances used/trauma saved probably cheaper still), lives beyond their means (too large a house/expensive a place to live, luxuries consumed, were stupid enough to get married/divorced...) then sucks to be them but beyond maybe ensuring they don't starve then resources better allocated on other things and why a company gets to fund that lifestyle when there are others balancing a book. Maybe teach their kids better risk management.
On companies doing record returns. This would be the technology/communications revolution -- my factory might make 10000 widgets (which is far better than skilled labourer/knitting circle doing local crafts) but it needs a proportional number of people, 10000 downloads or 10000000 needs about the amount of people to handle and is often quite lucrative (especially if those downloads are tied to people that still price things according to their basic senses of money and money they care to lose vs cost of running the service). Even those still shipping physical products have better/cheaper robots, better logistics, concepts like just in time manufacturing... to make it better than it was before and drop those overheads down further.
https://spendmenot.com/blog/best-performing-stocks/
https://compoundadvisors.com/2020/the-top-30-stocks-over-the-last-30-years
There is a reason most of those are tech companies, and why companies want to appear as tech companies (see the wework fiasco), and what few aren't tend to be healthcare which is not much better in a lot of ways.
If someone risks the time, money and effort in starting a business and it takes off then seems reasonable that they extract what they can from it, or at least can live handsomely if that is how it rolls.
If someone wants to trade some earning potential for some security and presumably less hassle than managing a business (which is tedious and distracts from getting stuff done) then their risk assessment to make and path to take.
If someone has a rare skill then provided said skill is in demand it will tend to drive up price of said skill until it becomes easier to train yourself up at it, train someone else, build a robot to handle it or do without. This seems obvious.
The reverse (a readily replaceable worker with a line out the door ready to take their place) will tend to see the price others willing to do it go down so they can get at least something, at least until it hits a floor there.
If someone has kids they can't afford (230000 USD to raise a kid to adulthood, possibly more if you are conned into a pointless degree https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-child . Abortions are cheap, condoms are cheaper/free, tubal ligations and vasectomies amortised over instances used/trauma saved probably cheaper still), lives beyond their means (too large a house/expensive a place to live, luxuries consumed, were stupid enough to get married/divorced...) then sucks to be them but beyond maybe ensuring they don't starve then resources better allocated on other things and why a company gets to fund that lifestyle when there are others balancing a book. Maybe teach their kids better risk management.
On companies doing record returns. This would be the technology/communications revolution -- my factory might make 10000 widgets (which is far better than skilled labourer/knitting circle doing local crafts) but it needs a proportional number of people, 10000 downloads or 10000000 needs about the amount of people to handle and is often quite lucrative (especially if those downloads are tied to people that still price things according to their basic senses of money and money they care to lose vs cost of running the service). Even those still shipping physical products have better/cheaper robots, better logistics, concepts like just in time manufacturing... to make it better than it was before and drop those overheads down further.
https://spendmenot.com/blog/best-performing-stocks/
https://compoundadvisors.com/2020/the-top-30-stocks-over-the-last-30-years
There is a reason most of those are tech companies, and why companies want to appear as tech companies (see the wework fiasco), and what few aren't tend to be healthcare which is not much better in a lot of ways.
While value added manufacturing is indeed good stuff I do have to play the hippie card and note that there is quite often a cost, and that cost is often the environment. Of course the answer there is usually more science so eh.The economy is not a zero sum game. Both sides benifit. You pay them money and you get goods and services in return. You both benefit.