> Why is paying people for their work not enough? If I want to plant crop A where people are otherwise growing crop B, and I agree to pay person Y Z dollars to tend my fields, why would I need to give person Y some of the crop they tended?
While I think it’s a bad idea to argue from analogies, because the crops have no value without this tending. It’s the labor invested in tending them that makes them worth anything at all. Owning land/Capital is demonstrably insufficient outside of an economy based exclusively on rentiering.
>Will they bail me out if the entire thing is a bust, I pay them Z dollars and my crop A is worthless?
If they were co-owners, they would certainly share in this burden. More abstractly, workers more often than not take the brunt of the suffering in failed enterprises. Just look at what happens to the average CEO of a failed company versus its workers.
While I think it’s a bad idea to argue from analogies, because the crops have no value without this tending. It’s the labor invested in tending them that makes them worth anything at all. Owning land/Capital is demonstrably insufficient outside of an economy based exclusively on rentiering.
>Will they bail me out if the entire thing is a bust, I pay them Z dollars and my crop A is worthless?
If they were co-owners, they would certainly share in this burden. More abstractly, workers more often than not take the brunt of the suffering in failed enterprises. Just look at what happens to the average CEO of a failed company versus its workers.