Pants-of-dog wrote:This does not contradict the point that stockbrokers are not universally necessary, or that they only serve a specific target market with large amounts of disposable income.
Retired people?
Stockbrokers are as universally necessary as cashiers. As I said, I can checkout my own groceries at Walmart and order and pay for my own food at McDonalds at the self-checkouts. People can trade their own stocks using online brokers. Cashiers and stockbrokers both provide a service for people who want help doing this. This function is necessary whether they are done by people themselves using self-serve technology or by others providing the service for them. Trading stocks and giving financial advice requires far more education and skill than working a checkout, therefore brokers make more money.
This is a strawman. Having said that, Bezos’s cashiers make money for Bezos while Bezos does not make money for the cashiers.
Bezos employs over 1 million people with jobs. Of course he makes them money LOL. He doesn't have cashiers, but let's call them order fillers.
His company sells countless items from countless companies and he makes tons of people a TON of money. His company shipped millions of people items during COVID. His company helped keep the economy afloat while people could work and live from home without getting spreading COVID while shopping at retail. His ideas have been ridiculously valuable to the economy and to society.
He's arguably the most economically valuable worker in the world and he's the richest man in the world to show for it. Compare that to a person working the cash at Walmart. They provide a valuable service too (otherwise there would be no cashiers), but they're far less valuable than Bezos by orders of magnitude. Imagine how many masks and bottles of sanitizer Bezos' company sold during COVID. Of course, he can't do that without the 1 million people he employs who stock and ship the product, but they couldn't have shipped it without Bezos. The difference is there's only a small amount of people in his country who can do his job as good as he can, while there's a large % of people who can do a good job as an order filler.
So you now are trying not to agree that there are other factors. If supply and demand were the only factors determining wage then doctors would literally be paid whatever they want.
Even if there were only 1 doctor in a city that doctor's income would still be determined by supply and demand, if his wage were determined by the market and not government. He or his employer couldn't charge whatever they want, they could only charge as much as people have. Price and wage are determined by supply and demand in a market, this is basic economics.
Garbage collectors objectively save lives by clearing away an important disease vector.
You're equating the value of the job function to the value of the employee. If virtually anyone can do a particular job the employee is of a low value when measured against other employees who are more highly skilled and in demand. Janitors have vital duties, but most people can do those duties and that's reflected in wage.