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The problem is that people try to invest their money, it’s worth than saving and end up making markets like real estate an investment asset as opposed to a huma
by baby 6y ago
The problem is that people try to invest their money, it’s worth than saving and end up making markets like real estate an investment asset as opposed to a human right. People always need to get richer.
- danuker 6y ago"problem"? I argue that a healthy economy should allow people to invest and defer consumption until they want to consume.
- simonh 6y agoIt's not that investment is bad, but that asset bubbles are bad even for the health of the long term investment landscape.
- danuker 6y agoIf only someone could profit off bubbles while at the same time deflating them...
- baby 6y agoAll I’m seeing in your healthy economy is disparity.
- imtringued 6y agoThe irony is that inflation is too low.
- andrepd 6y agoYou want to invest in productive activities (companies hiring more workers or buying more machines, paving roads, building libraries) rather than unproductive ones (land and property speculation, stock speculation, buy-to-let rent-seeking, etc)
- yanderekko 6y agoPaving roads is not an investment unless there's some sort of asset that you have equity in that will appreciate by your doing. But apparently you would condemn this as a form of "speculation". The desire to tax accumulated wealth is equivalent to the desire to tax saving and deferred consumption. People like to dance around this point but it's difficult to avoid how abhorrent this is when it's properly framed.
- andrepd 6y agoWhat in the actual — I specifically mentioned paving roads as an example of productive investment, how can you possibly claim I'm "condemning it as speculation"?
- lottin 6y agoSure, but this is not the job of the monetary system. The purpose of money is to facilitate economic transactions.
- imtringued 6y agoInvesting, in the sense that there will be a physical company in the real world, with paid employees doing productive work so that consumers can have services, goods or infrastructure is absolutely fantastic. We want more of this. Investing, in the sense that the company whose stock you are buying does absolutely nothing to justify the stock growth is absolutely horrifying. However, the good news is that the person selling the stock now has money and that person should better figure out how to do the first type of investing or they end up suffering from inflation.