Not arguing against you, just using your comment as a jumping off point:
If you are part of the owning class, you aren’t “earning” your wage. You are skimming the surplus value created by your employees and calling it “profit”
Capitalism not only encourages exploitation, but requires it. The whole purpose of capitalism is amassing capital, maximization of profit, and the way to do this is through taking the surplus value created by employees.
For example, when a car is created, raw materials go in and are assembled (at least in part) by people. The value created by turning those raw materials into a car is created by the employees that turned it into a car. The difference between the fair market value of that car and the raw materials put in is the value added by the worker.
If we were to actually pay these workers what they are worth, by the value they added to that car, there would be no profit. But because capitalism incentivises maximization of profit, the owning class pays you a wage that is always less than that value added, and they have incentive to make that wage as small as you are willing to take, after all, you can’t build the car yourself because you do not own the means of production
And therein lies the fundamental problem of capitalism. He who owns the means of production has the power.
Editing to add: If the workers owned the means of production, then there would be no reason for the owning (billionaire) class to exist – because they don’t actually do anything, they just own things.
Poverty wages are not evidence of a broken system, they are evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. We need an economic system that does not incentivize profit, period.
Thank you. Idk if this will be beneficial to my emotional wellbeing or not so I will likely forget about it