This is such a hilarious statement that you see all the time here.

> do the work that produces the value.

who then got paid for said value.

People who say things like that generally consider profit to be stealing because there would be no profit if everyone was paid for their value.

The way I see it is that profit occurs because the value of the end product is greater than the sum of its parts.

Unfortunately this won’t happen until the employee:employer power imbalance is changed, which effectively means a worker co-op.