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> It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time Strictly speaking, you don't need

• gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  War does not seem to destroy wealth, but redistribute it?
  • rmchugh 10y ago
    the argument is that increased taxation to fund a war effort plus increased industrial output to produce weapons of war leads to redistribution of wealth from the wealthy (who are disproportionately taxed) to the working class (who work in the factories and related industries to produce the armaments).
    • mtanski 10y ago
      I'm not sure that holds up in practice post WW2. At least here in the US. As long as we're running wars or never ending wars, wealth gets redistributed from all tax payers to owners of factories building war machines or war services (defense contractors). These owners can be direct or "indirect" stock owners. Sure the people who work in that industry get a "cut" but owners get the most and pay the lest to fund it as taxation on cap gains is lower then earned income.
  • jellicle 10y ago
    When a bomb destroys a building, to whom is the value of the building redistributed to?
    • JBReefer 10y ago
      Moloch
    • misja111 10y ago
      To the building company that will rebuild it.
      • wiz21c 10y ago
        hence to the people working for that company
      • jellicle 10y ago
        Oh, so the rebuilding is done for free, funded by the value of the original building? No. The rebuilding requires additional work/money inputs to create the new building. The value of the original building is lost forever.
        • RobertoG 10y ago
          "The value of the original building is lost forever." Of course, but if you are a building company, why would you care about that?. There is this idea, that, in a society with very little scarcity, would be almost impossible to make a profit. Your only chance would be to burn everything and start again. I really hope that theory is false.
          • njharman 10y ago
            Why? What is so great about profit? I would be very glad to give up profit for no scarcity.
            • jacobush 10y ago
              The ferengi is weak in this one.
              • gm-conspiracy 10y ago
                Sorry, I cannot resist adding a reference to gold-pressed latinum.
        • 10y ago
    • mtanski 10y ago
      Skanska? But in all seriousness I would look at multi-national companies and industries "selling shovels" that benefit for rebuilding both sides of war.
      • VMG 10y ago
        Contrast the sale of a car to the sale of a bomb: in the first case, both parties are clearly better off. In the second case, some people would argue that the commons is better off by funding a public good (national defense). If the sold weaponry is not increasing security for the public, or even decreasing it, wealth is destroyed. It's like buying a car and burning it on the spot.
    • RobertoG 10y ago
      To the owners of the other buildings, I suppose, they own a more scarce good now. Also, capital destruction give a chance for building again, and it's building again that you can extract value and make a profit.
      • philh 10y ago
        At most a portion of the value of the building has been redistributed. Some of it has just plain been destroyed. Also, capital in its undestroyed form can typically be used to extract value and make a profit. If that weren't true, there'd be little value and profit in building it in the first place. For example, a building can be used to provide people warmth and shelter in exchange for money. That's why the owner desires to own it, and that's why the owner (or someone down the chain) is willing to pay other people to build it.
    • mason240 10y ago
      It's troubling that this has to actually be explained.
  • noarchy 10y ago
    The Parable of the broken window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  • VMG 10y ago
    What's the opportunity cost of the defense budget?
  • jerf 10y ago
    You have to consider wealth over a historical time frame, and how it has changed, to understand why people think war might be a mean towards wealth and how that's changed over time. Wealth used to be food, livestock, people (because they can make food and manage livestock), and things generally coveted by all, like jewelry. It was easy to imagine how going to war might increase one's wealth; you simply take their food, livestock, jewelry, and enslave their people. You have to whack their warrior class to do it, but beyond that, conquest was a pretty good deal. Nowadays, actual physical conquest is not that useful for wealth acquisition. Bombing a skyscraper does not give you a skyscraper; it gives you an enormous mess to clean up. Too much modern wealth is in people's heads, or immobile infrastructure, or even just embedded in the ambient relationships between companies and people. A lot of that wealth is so fragile that it can be destroyed by a bad tax policy or poorly-conceived regulation, to say nothing of being literally bombed. Modern wars are still about wealth, of course... it's just a lot more subtle than it used to be, and no longer has much to do with redistribution. Now it's about suppressing a rival, or enforcing your economic will on another country (like what appears to be our current war in the middle east because we wanted a pipeline to go here instead of there, which has since spiraled out of control), but to a large degree even these actions are the exceptions. A lot of what used to be armed conflict now happens in treaty negotiations and diplomacy, threats of embargo and threats of tariff, negotiations in the UN, stuff like that. So it depends on your point of view. The really old ideas of war, that involve actually violence, is generally wealth destructive. If a war is going to stimulate an economy, it's going to be a subtle sort of economic stimulus from producing real goods and providing an impetus to reorganize the economy, not because of the spoils of war, which are all but useless in the modern era. But if you look at war in the broader sense, it has been almost entirely about redistribution, albeit mostly of future wealth (since current wealth is generally too expensive to move around). For instance, you don't really understand modern international climate negotiations if you think it is truly just about "climate"; it may be about that, but it is also a battle on the redistributive battleground.
  • xyzzy4 10y ago
    If you're hungry and you attack someone, you can get their food.
• Neliquat 10y ago
  Except for those who invested in war in the first place. Which is the problem.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  In practice, violence and war both destroy and redistribute wealth, both within and between parties to the violence (in fact, seizing economic resources from their current holder is one of the main reasons for violent conflict, whether intrastate or interstate.)
• wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  >The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four_(film) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four_(film)
  • jerf 10y ago
    Yeah, but despite the provenance of the quote, it's very hard to square with how the real world has evolved since Orwell wrote that can make a stronger case for the idea that a government pretty much has to keep its population a certain degree of comfortable or it's going to get overthrown than I can for them deliberately keeping them in poverty. The other problem with it is that the elite of a given culture draw their eliteness from the wealth of the culture itself. The elite of the US and the EU draw their outsized influence from the fact that they are the elite of a wealthy, powerful culture. If they set about making their cultures deliberately poorer, they are cutting their own influence off by destroying the things they're being the elite of. The elite of China aren't just trying to make their own countrymen relatively wealthier for its own sake (though that probably has an impact), it is also because it raises their own power in the rest of the world. I don't think he was correct about this. I think he just had a couple points from very early in the modern era, and drew the wrong extrapolation through them because they weren't representative. He was very intelligent, but having bad data is hard to overcome.
    • wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      >The other problem with it is that the elite of a given culture draw their eliteness from the wealth of the culture itself. The elite of the US and the EU draw their outsized influence from the fact that they are the elite of a wealthy, powerful culture. The marketplace is global, and wealth is easily siphoned off from other cultures and peoples across the world whom the elite are likely to never interact with otherwise. Cultures do not exist economically independent of others. Where do you think empires get their wealth from? >If they set about making their cultures deliberately poorer, they are cutting their own influence off by destroying the things they're being the elite of. This assumes the elite are idealistically patriotic rather than self-interested. On the contrary, they are increasing their margin of power over their subjects by taking their wealth and increasing their debts, and can easily move across to other cultures, bringing their wealth with them, if need be.