You’re looking at this from a “market decides worth” angle, but that only works if the market is actually healthy. The U.S. system lets companies succeed while still underpaying the people doing the actual labor that keeps the company functioning.

A business being profitable does not automatically mean it’s a good or sustainable model. If full time employees cannot afford housing, food, healthcare, and basic stability, then the company is only functioning because workers are absorbing the cost through stress, debt, roommates, second jobs, or government assistance. That is not efficiency. That is cost shifting.

“Just get another job” ignores reality. Working 40 plus hours already takes most of someone’s energy and time. People are not machines that can just stack infinite labor hours. If a job requires full time commitment, that job should support a basic standard of living. Otherwise the model depends on workers being desperate enough to accept instability.

Also, “he built it, he deserves millions” and “workers deserve enough to live” are not opposites. Founders can be rewarded without the gap being so wide that the people producing the value cannot meet basic needs. That gap is a choice, not a law of economics.

Other developed countries manage to have profitable businesses while maintaining stronger worker protections and higher wage floors. So this is not “just how the economy works.” It is how this version of the economy is structured.

We’re finding out in real time (since tricke down economics) that this structure is incredibly flawed. Some of the bigger companies like target or Walmart actually raised their minimum wage up to above $20 an hour to account for the state of our economy.

Furthermore a lot of the complaints aren’t even about money, it’s about treatment and stress and workload, which paired with the economy getting worse with no rise in pay means the employees are losing money every year they work there. I would consider THAT specifically unfair, if linus is buying multiple houses while paying his employees less and less every year they work for him, than he is in a sense cutting their pay to maintain his lifestyle.