Yet another Hacker News

23 points longitudinal93 2 hours ago 15 comments

inshard 15 minutes ago | parent

I am not seeing the connection. Whenever I hear capital and elites, it’s a clear red flag around lack of understanding. And just laziness about money. I think a lot of these voices would change if they just had 20% of disposable income auto-invested in equities from an early age.

stetrain 9 minutes ago | parent

"just get some capital"

electric_mayhem 9 minutes ago | parent

As an ex-Apple engineer who grew up with four generations living in a duplex, and as someone who now sees people struggling with grocery and gas prices and utility prices, I feel like more people even having any disposable income at all might be a better start.

bluefirebrand 6 minutes ago | parent

> I think a lot of these voices would change if they just had 20% of disposable income auto-invested in equities from an early age

What disposable income? When I was younger I had none, I was too busy paying rent and tuition,

MarkusQ 10 minutes ago | parent

Marxist slop. Old school, apparently hand crafted bespoke slop, but slop nonetheless.

(Labor theory of value, they got rich by stealing what was rightfully yours, lots of linguistic games, private ownership is the root problem, yada yada...)

strken 7 minutes ago | parent

It's not Marxist at all, otherwise it'd be talking about the labour theory of value and wouldn't admit that profit through innovation is possible. It seems to be Georgist.

popalchemist 6 minutes ago | parent

Marx's core premise, that capital tends to pool in the hands of the few, is the idea underpinning the entirety of our modern economy.

mwkaufma 4 minutes ago | parent

Ctrl-F "marx" -- 0 results.

jstanley 10 minutes ago | parent

> There is no more intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital than there is none for the scarcity of air.

You're suggesting that capital holders restrict the supply of capital so that they can extract rent on it? And if they didn't do that we'd just have unlimited capital and everybody would get to be arbitrarily rich?

Then what do capital holders get out of restricting the supply? Wouldn't they rather be arbitrarily rich instead?

> Every claim on human effort that exits the productive system as rent is a claim that cannot circulate internally, cannot pay workers fairly, cannot fund the next big idea or reduce the cost of the next product.

What? Why? When you pay rent do you think your landlord isn't going to spend that money?

asdfasgasdgasdg 8 minutes ago | parent

The rich are hoarding the pocket dimensions in the West Village where there is unlimited space for people to live, in order to extract higher rents!

fhdkweig 4 minutes ago | parent

As they say, "The sky's the limit." Just build taller buildings.

asdfasgasdgasdg 2 minutes ago | parent

I'm all in favor of that. But in NYC, wealth is hardly a predictor of YIMBYism in either direction.

epistasis 6 minutes ago | parent

These are very good ideas for much more of the populace to digest and internalize. I'm not sure how many will.

And much of the popular critique of capitalism is driven by those who don't distinguish between profit and rent, when in fact the near entirely of the extraction that is causing inequality is from rent extraction and not "profit" as used in this piece. Especially when it comes to real estate, which is most people's largest expense, growing, and one of the biggest political challenges we face today. (Broad homeownership has created a lot of people that benefit from increasing residential housing costs, or at least don't see any problems with them).

Glad to see Schumpeter get mentioned, as Schumpeterian rents are perhaps defensible for a while, I think.