is up to a million times av/hr pay excessive for working 'very very hard'?

Question

bill gates has peak pay/hr at a million times avg pay/hr - & has averaged over his career at 50,000 times av pay/hr
meanwhile the avg person works over 50 hrs/wk [i have seen figures on the net of over 90hrs/wk for american housewives, figures of 70 hrs/wk for british housewives - & the poorer the person, the harder they have to work just to survive - poorer means underpowered, so victim of the relative power of others, ie, they get stolen from, they have to slave [euphemisms: exploited, underprivileged]
& the hardest working person cannot do more than double this /wk
so can 'working very hard' justify no more than twice the average pay?
is this correct thinking?
is there a mistake in the reasoning anywhere?
when a person says: i worked hard for 'my' money, can we rightfully ask: what was your avg pay/hr? ie what is your fortune + spending, divided by workhrs?
what if 'his' pay/hr is 50,000 times avg? or 10x avg? hard work cannot justify higher than avg pay/hr - can anything?

Answer 1

LOOk your probably a better man then BILL gates

Answer 2

If someone is willing to pay $1 billion for my services, that is what my services are worth. If my skills are worth only $5.15 per hour, than that is it. The skills needed to earn $5.15 per hour are generally common and easily found, Michael Jordan's skills are clearly NOT easily found.

The amount of "working hard" is irrelevant. A factory lineworker might work hard, but also does not risk their home or cash in case the business fails, whereas a Bill Gates did risk his assets in starting Microsoft and no one guaranteed him any income.

Answer 3

You're correct, of course.

I've worked with people who 'work hard' and it's obscene. That usually means that they spend all their time harrassing all the people who really ARE productive, and whatever they actually accomplish most often must be undone and redone by someone else.

These people are more often power brokers, and politically savvy. They SCHEME hard on how to rip off others, and THAT is how they 'earn' their over-the-top earnings multiplier.

For example, Bill Gates has never written a program in his life. He purchased DOS for $50,000 and resold it to IBM as the operating system for their personal computer. The rest, as they say, is history.

Answer 4

"They make too much money !"
"People shouldn't be allowed to make 10 million dollars a year."
"How can any person be worth that much ?"

You hear these complaints again and again, against pro athletes, rock stars, CEOs (especially of those big bad pharmaceutical companies - how dare they make medicine !), and other multi-millionaires. The "argument" being that these people are just like you and me, and so they should make as much as we make. That there is somehow something morally outrageous about making more money than most people. That there should be class jealousy, and perhaps more class warfare.

But what does this really mean in economic terms ? Most people do not make their money by stealing it from other people (except politicians, but few people complain about their salaries - they even defend politicians by comparing them to athletes). They make money by selling or helping to sell a product - music albums, tickets, jerseys, whatever. And people pay for these products because they perceive them as being of value. Athletes and singers make their money because they contribute much needed entertainment to people, and these people appreciate it and buy their products. So then the question arises, how much contribution to people's values is too much.

Seen from this individualist perspective, the complaints against high salaries are absurd. How can we fault anyone for contributing too much to society ? And more importantly, how can we blame them for consumer choice, something they have no control over.
At best, an anti-individualist could argue that his values are better than everyone else's and that he wouldn't buy such products, but his values are irrelevant to those of the other people in a given society. People will hold the values they want, and express them in the way they want, and it's the role of the free market to help them do so.

Calls for class warfare, therefore, are misguided. It is not against "the rich" that they are really fighting, but against their "fellow classists" who go to the arena, buy CDs, and watch shows on television. In essence, they are against individual values, because individual values do not promote their classist agenda. Either way, it is the connection between salary and people's values, which is obvious if you look at the situation in individualist terms, that they are failing to grasp. Salaries are not taken out of thin air. They depend on revenues, which depend on spending, which depend on values. If no one was interested in sports, then no one would go to the stadiums, and no athlete would make money. It is, in fact, a testimony to Western civilization that we have attained such a level of prosperity that we can devote so much money to entertainment !

"Social justice" is not to be found in the greedy power-mongering and kangaroo courts of the statists. Coercion is not just. The only social justice that exists, must be based on cooperation and non-coercion. This is because justice consists of getting what one earns, and not getting the unearned - this applies to trials but to other aspects of life as well. By trading, people deal with each other by value. But when coercion exists, the strong and powerful will always take what the masses earn and use them for themselves, sometimes using them as a tool of manipulation, unearned resources for the taking of this or that interest group. The free market therefore, is true social justice where you receive resources and popularity proportionally to the perceived value of your contributions, and give proportionally to how you perceive other people's work. That is the only just principle. That is the only way society progresses and the only way the masses can work for a better life. It is in fact the only principle that has ever yielded progress or equality. The opposite principle - that a ruling class should establish itself by force and redistribute resources to further its aims - has never produced anything but tax slavery, war (financed by tax slavery) and suffering (thanks to war). You shall know them by their fruits !

Answer 5

it is not excessive --- there are plenty of examples of people changing their circumstances if they want to

its not working harder its working smarter --- i dont want to be bill gates or any other multi billionaire and i dont begrugde them their money -- they have earned it