The entrepreneurs over at Hacker News who like to pretend they're rich and can turn their little startup into Apple are praising the impressive profits that Apple has reported. What's more impressive is that they fail to make the connection between gigantic profits and the very low amount of wages and salary paid to workers and employees.

Apple apparently makes $409,000 in net income per employee. One commenter congratulates the managers for doing an "epic job". The only epic job they've done is in tricking employees to give up the value that they generate over to the company. The maximum salary that any employee who isn't an executive or manager will make is between 1/4th and 1/3rd of that. For all these entrepreneurs, libertarians, and other capitalist supporters who think that you should be able to earn as much as possible, it should be disturbing that employees are only earning a certain percentage of the value that they produce. It should be shocking and disgusting that a worker on an assembly line in China makes way below minimum wage when the value they produce is very high.

All Apple employees could be paid double and there would still be a significant amount of profit left. Let that sink in for a moment. A major corporation will not go bankrupt if it pays its employees double their salary. I acknowledge that my math here is based on rough figures but shit, even a few thousand dollars more in salary per employee would be pretty awesome. It's unfortunate that more people don't realize that the value they produce is much greater than the salary or wages they get in return.

Yes this was a bit of a rant and no I won't try to explain it all. Just go read some Marx, read up on profit as exploitation or surplus value theory, and think about how much value you produce for your employer and how much they're paying you and figure out how much the difference is.