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Wow you're taking the story way too literally if your takeaway from my story is that you think I was saying that the world needs more coffee shops. The whole po

Wow you're taking the story way too literally if your takeaway from my story is that you think I was saying that the world needs more coffee shops. The whole point is that our society rewards financial speculation and rentiership / wealth-extraction over labor, the topic of the book in this thread. I never said that management isn't work. I'm saying that society overly glorifies managers and underappreciates workers, as evidenced by CEOs getting paid 271x the average worker. Everyone can't be a manager, financier, or passive business owner, someone has to do the actual work. > What would you think if someone claimed that a major problem in society is small business owners who are not lazy enough? People like your friend are making it harder for all of the competitors and their employees by working long hours for little money, so it becomes a "tragedy of the commons" Sounds like you're blaming a systemic problem on individuals. Sad that people are misinterpreting my little story to think my takeaway is that everyone needs to work harder. If it were up to me, we'd have a universal basic income and anybody could do as they please without having the threat of destitution constantly looming under them.

perl4ever 6y ago
How is living off UBI not being a "rentier"? How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? How much lower can capital returns go compared to labor when most of the developed world is seeing near zero or even negative interest rates? You write "I never said that management isn't work" and then your next sentence says exactly that management isn't work. Again. Also is "taking the story way too literally" an admission that it's fictional?
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  > Rentier capitalism is a term currently used to describe the belief in economic practices of monopolization of access to any kind of property (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society A UBI recipient has not monopolized anything. UBI is just a citizen's dividend (eg. see Henry George) for forgoing access to their share of land/natural resources and allowing landlords/capital to monopolize them. Or alternatively, the payments landlords/rentiers pay to society in exchange for the privilege of their monopoly. But really the argument for a UBI is more about just having a more robust safety net so that nobody has to face destitution and people have the freedom to pursue whatever work they want and take greater risks (eg. starting businesses, research), especially as automation eliminates vast swaths of the labor market. Clearly this is completely different in both spirit and effect from say a minority class of private landlords leeching off workers and contributing nothing to society. > How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? Why can't I say that? You think everyone is going to stop working if we implement a UBI? > I can't disagree with you per se when everything you write seems to cancel out in a vague cloud of doublethink. Hard to discuss anything with you when you haven't written a coherent argument. If you have something meaningful to say, then say it, don't just list a bunch of vague random questions and try to put the burden on me to figure out what your point is.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >A UBI recipient has not monopolized anything I'm not sure I understand. You could equally say a shareholder of public company stock hasn't monopolized anything in exactly the same way, no? That's what the word share means. If you have Apple stock, you're not monopolizing any of their assets. So are you saying that there's an essential difference between someone who owns an apartment or two and rents them out vs. someone who owns an equal amount of an investment fund (whether real estate or not) and makes the same amount of money? Is the former a "rentier" and the latter not? It's an interesting idea, that modern finance is largely socialist, and the remaining work to be done is to eliminate all the small time capitalists that own actual means of production rather than shares, and redistribute the shares equally. But there is all this romanticization of "small businesses" that has to be undone to get to that socialist paradise.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      > So are you saying that there's an essential difference between someone who owns an apartment or two and rents them out vs. someone who owns an equal amount of an investment fun Yes, the difference is that land was not created by anyone, it is given to us by the earth. Thus everyone is entitled to their fair share of the land. Land ownership itself is the exclusion of land from everyone else - a monopoly. Any profit made off of the land value itself is unearned income, and should be taxed. I'm just relaying Henry George's Land Value Tax
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >> How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? >Why can't I say that? You think everyone is going to stop working if we implement a UBI? No more than you think everyone is presently "a manager, financier, or passive business owner".

perl4ever 6y ago

How is living off UBI not being a "rentier"? How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? How much lower can capital returns go compared to labor when most of the developed world is seeing near zero or even negative interest rates? You write "I never said that management isn't work" and then your next sentence says exactly that management isn't work. Again. Also is "taking the story way too literally" an admission that it's fictional?

JSavageOne 6y ago
> Rentier capitalism is a term currently used to describe the belief in economic practices of monopolization of access to any kind of property (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society A UBI recipient has not monopolized anything. UBI is just a citizen's dividend (eg. see Henry George) for forgoing access to their share of land/natural resources and allowing landlords/capital to monopolize them. Or alternatively, the payments landlords/rentiers pay to society in exchange for the privilege of their monopoly. But really the argument for a UBI is more about just having a more robust safety net so that nobody has to face destitution and people have the freedom to pursue whatever work they want and take greater risks (eg. starting businesses, research), especially as automation eliminates vast swaths of the labor market. Clearly this is completely different in both spirit and effect from say a minority class of private landlords leeching off workers and contributing nothing to society. > How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? Why can't I say that? You think everyone is going to stop working if we implement a UBI? > I can't disagree with you per se when everything you write seems to cancel out in a vague cloud of doublethink. Hard to discuss anything with you when you haven't written a coherent argument. If you have something meaningful to say, then say it, don't just list a bunch of vague random questions and try to put the burden on me to figure out what your point is.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >A UBI recipient has not monopolized anything I'm not sure I understand. You could equally say a shareholder of public company stock hasn't monopolized anything in exactly the same way, no? That's what the word share means. If you have Apple stock, you're not monopolizing any of their assets. So are you saying that there's an essential difference between someone who owns an apartment or two and rents them out vs. someone who owns an equal amount of an investment fund (whether real estate or not) and makes the same amount of money? Is the former a "rentier" and the latter not? It's an interesting idea, that modern finance is largely socialist, and the remaining work to be done is to eliminate all the small time capitalists that own actual means of production rather than shares, and redistribute the shares equally. But there is all this romanticization of "small businesses" that has to be undone to get to that socialist paradise.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    > So are you saying that there's an essential difference between someone who owns an apartment or two and rents them out vs. someone who owns an equal amount of an investment fun Yes, the difference is that land was not created by anyone, it is given to us by the earth. Thus everyone is entitled to their fair share of the land. Land ownership itself is the exclusion of land from everyone else - a monopoly. Any profit made off of the land value itself is unearned income, and should be taxed. I'm just relaying Henry George's Land Value Tax
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >> How can you say "someone has to do the actual work" in the same comment you end by advocating UBI? >Why can't I say that? You think everyone is going to stop working if we implement a UBI? No more than you think everyone is presently "a manager, financier, or passive business owner".