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Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#91

Post by petra »

styrophone wrote: post #58
petra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Israel, in the 50's-80's, in government housing there was a kind of rent that accumulated towards payment of your house. And i'm not 100% sure, but maybe even if you needed to move houses(in coordination with government rent company), the collected money would have transported with you to your new house. EDIT: just to add context - Israel had a huge challenge - it was created with the goal of being a home for ever…

Rent-to-own in general exists as a concept in many places, but it has a sour reputation due to the predatory practice of vanishing equity. Essentially, a renter is sold on a higher rent price on the premise that it will result in their eventual ownership. However, if they fail to make rent or must leave early for various circumstances, they have no equity to recoup. In some cases, this serves as an incentive to force…

Yes, under capitalism, everything that can be corrupted will be corrupted. This generally seem to be less of a problem for the nordic countries somehow, probably a combination of strong regulation and a culture a bit more geared towards fairness.

BTW, Singapore has an home ownership rate of 90%, so it seems like a big success.

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#94

Post by ommunist »

snowwindwaves wrote: post #66
ommunist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly thousands. 240 000 people die every year in car accidents and no one prohibits cars. Millions died in WW2, but it is not the USSR to blame for it. How many Indians were killed for the US to prosper? We are speaking about fhe better system you never tried. No rich, no poor, everyone has a job.

>Everyone has a job I visited cuba in 1998 for a few weeks. I was staying with a family who hosted visitors like my father and myself for a little extra foreign currency on the side. The father of the family that we were staying with was a chief economist in Castro's government. I will never forget riding the elevator at the university in Havana. There was a woman whose job it was to press the buttons in the elevator…

You are surprisingly right. Small state like Cuba with monocultural agriculture and lack of industry is destined for that. But even in these hard conditions Cuba has a better and more people oriented medical care system than the US has and is exporting medical know-how to the third world.

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#95

Post by sbuttgereit »

ommunist wrote: post #33
sbuttgereit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many millions of innocents dead.

Hardly thousands. 240 000 people die every year in car accidents and no one prohibits cars. Millions died in WW2, but it is not the USSR to blame for it. How many Indians were killed for the US to prosper? We are speaking about fhe better system you never tried. No rich, no poor, everyone has a job.

Hardly thousands

That is a barefaced lie. Forgetting the rest of the evil attributable to Communist ideology, the Ukrainian Genocide alone is evidence that it was many more than "hardly thousands": http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-r...

Indeed, one need only consider the ease of which one could immigrate out of USSR, or other Communist states for that matter, to know something was seriously fucked in your glorious worker's paradise. How good can a political system possibly be when that same system makes it illegal to leave the country and your own citizens are willing to risk their lives to get out? I think if you look back on history, the real stand-out achievements of the Communist system are really it's unrivaled ability to systematically dole out want, suffering, and death to all but a political elite.

Given the logic of your last arguments however, I can easily see why someone such as yourself can look past the facts of the matter and support such a murderous, despicable system such as Communism.

Pointing to accidental deaths, or deaths from wars, or other misdeeds as somehow justifying the volitional and indiscriminate murder of whole populations defies logic. Someone else's wrong does not justify the sort of violence that your original posting obliquely supported.

In the end, your willingness to claim the great benefits of Communism while evading the methods used to cement the power of Communist party officials over the population should be red flag enough to any sane-minded person to reject you and your wares. Even then I would argue the equality of misery produced by the Communist to be no great achievement. Oh... and as for never trying it... I've never been burnt to death either, but I'm smart enough to know I want no part of it.

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#96

Post by douche »

rskar wrote: post #88
lgieron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I call a revolution "a win" - see the French revolution (hundreds of thousands dead in cleansings, country ruled by ruthless dictator) or Bolshevik or Chinese Communist Revolutions. I'm finding it hard to come up with a positive counterexample.

American revolution? Is that one a flop? (I mean for now, future trajectories aside.)

Quite possibly the only popular revolution of the modern age that didn't end in massacres. Probably because it was, despite all the rhetoric, controlled by a group of generally conservative oligarchs who really weren't trying to shake things up that dramatically.

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#97

Post by futureiswithus »

praptak wrote: post #85
mbfg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i understand your sentiment here, and in the view of history this is true. The problem is that now, or very soon, we are/will be in a state where the 1% can easily put down the 99% politically, socially, financially and yes militarily. So there may be a reckoning at some point. But it will and badly for the 99%. This was mostly true throughout history as well, it's just become a more certainty now.

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

We can boycott the rich. And when we cant, we can just choose to buy from the least rich

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#98

Post by notahacker »

oconnor663 wrote: post #39

> If you buy some shares in M&S or BP on the stock market, the money you pay goes to the previous owner, not the company. You are what Keynes called a ‘functionless investor.’ When such so-called ‘investments’ pay off they extract wealth from the economy without creating anything in return. This doesn't seem very coherent. How could a company ever sell stock to raise capital, if the people who bought that stock didn'…

A better way of putting it would be that your investment might improve the economy only via side effects (e.g. the investor who you purchase the shares from is able to invest that money in a new business venture or buying actual goods, or a boost to the company's share price from your buying activity [if you're a massive fund owner] encourages new businesses to start up in that industry or makes it cheaper and easier for them to raise capital)

Your contribution to the wealth of the economy from buying the stock is only the effect of the marginal increase in the speed of transaction and price from the share owner selling to you rather than having to wait for the next, possibly lower bidder on the share. The contribution to the economy made from you passively holding the stock is only the effect of the marginal boost to the share price from you not selling on entrepreneurs, lenders and investors. The average gain you make from share price appreciation is likely to be more than that; the difference is economic rent.

Given there are already enough stock investors for trades to be made in microseconds with tiny spreads, the positive effect of an individual secondary market stock trade is so close to zero as to make the "functionless investor" characterization broadly correct.[1] Moreover, since your decision to purchase secondary market stock has an opportunity cost; you might otherwise have invested it directly in producing something in a market without such ready access to capital, its effect on economic growth might be net negative.

[1]of all the circumstances where economists treat transfer payments as irrelevant, this one might be the most justified

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#99

Post by ommunist »

ageofwant wrote: post #32

Being separated from other people causes brain damage. This truth works on many levels. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4lianf/whats_a_d... Read through that reddit thread, can you relate ? Empathy certainly is a function of social distance. The very rich are very distant, have very little empathy, and are therefore mentally ill.

No, they are OK. They just have other problems, not another scale like 'I do not have 100K to close my mortgage and that guy has no extra 2BN to buy that robotics facility in Korea'. They live in another dimension. It is called power, when they decide about values of your currencies for example - remember what Soros did to the sterling pound.

Re: Challenging the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

#100

Post by golergka »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #82
oconnor663 wrote: post #39

> If you buy some shares in M&S or BP on the stock market, the money you pay goes to the previous owner, not the company. You are what Keynes called a ‘functionless investor.’ When such so-called ‘investments’ pay off they extract wealth from the economy without creating anything in return. This doesn't seem very coherent. How could a company ever sell stock to raise capital, if the people who bought that stock didn'…

I think capital allocation is sometimes too abstract for people to see the value in. If I bought some land, built a windmill with my bare hands out of stone and wood that I cut and shopped myself, and became the flour producer for the entire region, people tend to say it's a deserved reward. If I bought that company, paid people to do all the work setting up a dozen more windmills, paid people to manage the new bigge…

There's one thing this communist logic doesn't take into account: risk. Ownership and risk are inherently tied to one another. Thinking only about scenarios where this risk already passed and then calling owners "parasites" is survivorship bias in the purest form.
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