I would say that slavery absolutely fits into this broad generalized definition of leverage that I am using. Here is another example:
In the case of the founder, as I have mentioned, hiring someone gives them leverage. But conversely, a person taking a job with a large company gives the employee leverage. For instance, as a Google software engineer, you have the ability to command huge amounts of computing hardware that Google has at its disposal. Different roles may have varying degrees of ability to leverage the corporation's scale to their purposes but it's certainly a very real thing for many roles.
The problem with this definition is that slave owners didn't think that there was anything morally wrong with owning slaves. If they objected to slavery then why would they keep their slaves?
Wall Street originally was built to trade shares in corporate plantations.
Many plantations did not get going with ethnicity-based slave labor, it was voluntary indenturement as a result of extreme inequality relative to the royal shareholders of these non-free-enterprise corporations, i.e. economic slavery as a foundation for the lowest-class labor force to begin with.
It's a slippery slope from there, keeping them down on the farm.
Don't forget the American colonies were founded by (royal) multinational corporations for the benefit of multinational corporations.
But B.Franklin and those guys came along and wanted independent non-royal corporations, and the next thing you know, it's the USA on the Eastern Seaboard with its well-developed ports and united plantations.
And they were trading shares right there in Manhattan, on that previously underutilized street with the characteristic old wall.
Otherwise not much had changed from how they did it in London, or it would have been an even more difficult transition.
Imagine what it was like under bondage when a downturn or business model failure pressured a worker to tend 5 acres instead of 2. When 2 was already quite tiring and not very rewarding.
And with the shareholders up on Wall Street having financial control, when the market comes back nicely the shareholders recover even more nicely if little or none of the prosperity is intentionally returned to the now much-more-productive & hard-working laborers.
Simply because the system is made to extract from bonded laborers, and they are the lowest-hanging fruit when shareholder returns need to be maintained during a downturn.
Wall Street volatility gives some of them the chance to rinse and repeat each time before their big wigs get repowdering.
For real major upsets or windfalls the banks can go further and adjust the terms on their notes to most strongly leverage the situation.
The mint can change the value of its legal tender notes in response too, so far only periodic devaluation for the dollar, no two-for-one splits in your favor or anything like that for you wage-earners even in the best of times.
If every citizen were generously issued two new dollars for every old dollar you had in liquid cash at the time, you can expect to continue working for the same dollar pay as before and have the same debt payments to minimize upset, but who would benefit most anyway?
Don't even think about a reverse split which is severely in your disfavor by comparison.
Better get accustommed to what a dollar won't buy any more now, a change in value either way and you'll be worse off.
Turns out dilution of certificates is the most effective if not expedient way to overcome liberty & justice for all.
If you're going to be a billionaire anyway, build something with real value added that's more than worth it for as many people as possible, with enough success to completely commit to avoiding significant negative consequences.
That's what billionaires are supposed to be there for.
None of that fake stuff.
Gag me with a silver spoon if you can't build anything real of widespread benefit, plus avoid negative outcomes with all that money.
Something that would help would be more benevolent billionaires willing to pay whatever it takes to bypass our current crooked political parties. There simply still exists the same need to admit only the most ethical to Washington (or preferably a new capitol) before Wall Street can be expected to deviate from the plantation model these parties sustain.
Looks to me like pg has built YC to be more worthwhile than not, even if every company has not created value itself.
One measure of success is the increased number of opportunites for upcoming entrepreneurs to have an open-ended upside if they are ambitious and can build a scalable system.
Often this can be leveraged to exponential growth by wise application of capital, without the need for involvement of destructive greed of any kind.
Depending on where in the food chain the food for growth comes from, some businesspeople are bound to make better billionaires than others, especially if they can avoid harmful wealth extraction from the most vulnerable workers and populations, and substitute responsible value creation with resulting widespread prosperity instead.
Works best when you build something people really want and always give them more than their money's worth.
