3 ms·
"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simu
by rdiddly 8y ago
"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure."
No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People start or invest in businesses because they want a little bit more "inequality" in their bank account. It's not to enrich everybody equally.
If you make widgets for $4.50 and sell them for $5 each to a million people, you just extracted $0.50 from a million people and made yourself $500,000. Inequality. It's weird how people have this blind spot where they fail to integrate the big bad word "inequality" they see in the headlines, with the supposedly good and morally harmless act of making oneself rich a.k.a. unequal. I guess it's a disconnect between the micro & macro scales.
A rising tide of water will lift all actual boats, but a 'rising tide' of money doesn't lift all boats, unless there's some intervention in a more socialist direction, such as progressive taxation, to make the money act more like water. Water spreads out flat and covers all ground equally, that's how it manages to lift all boats.
- nradov 8y agoThat's not how capitalism works. If you make a new widget for $4.50 and sell it for $5.00 then both the buyer and seller are enriched. You haven't impoverished anyone.
- rdiddly 8y agoYou're reacting to the word impoverished. You have "extracted 50 cents from them," is that better? I'll change it. Don't get distracted. Edit: Also, there's short-term and long-term enrichment. The widget I sell might be a capital good that earns an income for its buyer, or it might just as easily be something that only depreciates or even destroys other wealth. Whereas the money I've collected can reliably be made to earn an income in any number of ways, which is why I always argue that the money is usually inherently worth more, and nobody on HN seems to agree with that.
- nradov 8y agoI'm not distracted, you simply don't understand basic economics.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TACIXAT 8y ago>If you make widgets for $4.50 and sell them for $5 each to a million people You've identified a want and delivered a product to a million people. What is the proper compensation for that? Should people not be allowed to identify wants and address them for profit? I think the error in your view is that any sale is predatory, when in reality both the consumer and seller can profit. One gains something they need or want and the other gets money. Sure, buying consumer crap isn't going to lift you out of poverty, but you're still getting a benefit from the transaction.
- rdiddly 8y agoI'm not trying to outrage you, nor do I necessarily care what's "proper" or "allowed" or "right/wrong" since literally nobody making policy decisions is asking me about it anyway. I'm saying quite literally, and as blandly as possible given my way of talking (and even more blandly after an earlier edit), that in selling to people, you extract wealth from them, which creates wealth inequality. The more you do it, the more unequal it gets. Pretty straightforward, I thought.
- TACIXAT 8y agoI'm not outraged and it's pretty silly to assume I am. That said, what if a factory owner in China makes widgets and sells them to Americans. Is that increasing inequality?
- onemoresoop 8y agoNobody says people should be paid equally. That makes no sense, there are different types of work and efforts involved. However, when most can't make ends meet and few have more than the rest, this "inequality" thing becomes a big problem. When there is a decent standard of living, access to healthcare, housing, education, then inequality is more than welcome, it becomes as you say an incentive to to better.