Does being tall make someone more deserving of a basketball scholarship than someone born with different genetics?
> So you put part of it back into circulation and kept the rest for yourself. You're still not doing any better than morally neutral.
You're not giving it away, you're exchanging it for something that you consume. You're causing some chemist to make recreational drugs instead of medicine, or causing someone to do sex work when you could have paid someone to build housing. That's not morally neutral.
> Well where did the value that it corresponds to come from? (I assume you're not just talking about inflation, or labour being scarcer or anything like that - but in that case the raise won't have come from nowhere).
Inflation is boring because then the real value would be the same. Labor being scarcer, on the other hand, is a perfect example. Some new large employer moves into town and your boss gives you a raise rather than see you quit and have to pay retraining costs for someone they'd still have to pay the extra $2 to. You haven't done anything different, why do you "deserve" any more money?
> If it was previously just economic rent that the boss was extracting then yes it's zero sum because it was zero sum to start with.
Suppose the boss was getting it, but as compensation for labor rather than economic rent. The boss found a source for the wood and lined up customers and all of that but now has to pay you more out of his own pocket because local labor demand increased while demand for tables is the same because they're sold into a national market.
And yet, even by paying you the extra $2, the boss is still receiving a net benefit from operating the business, as were you when you were working for the original wage. Changing the amount is zero sum, but the activity it's compensating isn't, so how do you want to call it?
