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>the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers? Correct! Because the act of creation is where value is created. By definition capital does not create

>the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers? Correct! Because the act of creation is where value is created. By definition capital does not create value, otherwise there would be no requirement to have labor to do the “transformation.” Exactly to your point I have at points had quite a bit of money (not currently true). But it’s not from “capital growth” it’s from aggressively selling my labor and capturing the majority of my labor value. That said, if you were to compare the amount of value, I’ve created to the amount of money I received, It’s not even fucking close I’ve created 1000x more value than I have captured. Why? because at the time that I did those deals, I was not in a powerful enough position to demand the value capture, because we’re stuck in a state where the vast majority of people need to debase themselves simply to survive. Is that the type of system that has long term capacity for multigenerational equitable success? The answer is no and there’s no way you can slice that that makes it a yes. If, however, your goal is a infinite race to the bottom for worker self exploitation, where people will literally destroy themselves in order to otherwise survive, based on the whims of hoarded capital owners arbitrary self inflated egos about how the world works. Having been a LP in a venture fund, a Director in a large public company, and a multitime start up founder I can guarantee this is exactly how it works. If that’s the world you want then we’re right on track.

wolverine876 3y ago
Well, I wouldn't go nearly as far as you do, but I do appreciate your up front, clear argument for your point. My perception is that the labor/capital allocation of return is far out of whack, due to a power imbalance. But I feel you still aren't accounting for the value of capital. It's too easy an answer, intellectually, just to dismiss the whole thing and ignore the complication. Production requires capital and labor. If I lend you my truck for your contracting service, shouldn't I get some return on that? What if you use my property to manufacture your skateboard (or whatever)? What if I give you some of my personal cash to hire workers, who then produce the skateboards, which you sell at a profit? I know these are simple, chosen examples, but where do you see the problem and how do you quantify appropriate returns?
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  No, you did nothing. Why would you get anything? Holding keys to a cache of goods isn’t a skill. Even if you claim to have thought really really hard about when to open the vault, the simple act of hoarding less, does not transform the goods into value. The fact of hoarding, crowds out others use of the resource (reducing monetary velocity) so that means for people who want to make more, the choices made for when to open the vault are solely dependent on an mathematically unequitable distribution of the resultant created goods, in effect stealing directly from the people making value. To be clear I’m not making the Labor Theory of Value argument - I’m simply demonstrating that by capitals own standard (increase in value based on capital labor mix) capital should get no excess return. In fact the only argument capitialists have left is the contract and this is the Mises style MaximumCapitalist like Hans Hoppe. The argument goes that as long as a contract is signed, there cannot be anything unethical.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    If we simplify away the personal issue of 'that's my truck; you'll have to pay me to use it' - we forget property rights and the psychological attachment to property, which I don't think is realistic or wise. (Also, I've recently been reading about 'cultural universals' - behaviors in all/most/many unrelated cultures through time and geography that are not biologically determined (as far as we know) - and property is one of them.) I'm sure you know the next issue: How in your system is capital efficiently allocated? The issue is not hoarding (or not necessarily), it's natural scarcity of capital. How do we decide who gets to use the truck or the property, etc.? We know the capitalist method of allocation, which is rather productive in aggregate. Other methods have been unproductive, broadly speaking. First come first serve? Also, the worker in your system gets all the return. Great. Now they have some money and they buy a truck. But now they own capital, the truck and hopefully some cash left over. Must they lend it to someone else without return? I dunno, but they might not be happy with that!
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      To your question on property: The claim that the idea of private property ownership is universal is just incorrect. Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/property/ch04.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho... (You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular) Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such. How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism. Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it. Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html Thanks for the debate

wolverine876 3y ago

Well, I wouldn't go nearly as far as you do, but I do appreciate your up front, clear argument for your point. My perception is that the labor/capital allocation of return is far out of whack, due to a power imbalance. But I feel you still aren't accounting for the value of capital. It's too easy an answer, intellectually, just to dismiss the whole thing and ignore the complication. Production requires capital and labor. If I lend you my truck for your contracting service, shouldn't I get some return on that? What if you use my property to manufacture your skateboard (or whatever)? What if I give you some of my personal cash to hire workers, who then produce the skateboards, which you sell at a profit? I know these are simple, chosen examples, but where do you see the problem and how do you quantify appropriate returns?

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
No, you did nothing. Why would you get anything? Holding keys to a cache of goods isn’t a skill. Even if you claim to have thought really really hard about when to open the vault, the simple act of hoarding less, does not transform the goods into value. The fact of hoarding, crowds out others use of the resource (reducing monetary velocity) so that means for people who want to make more, the choices made for when to open the vault are solely dependent on an mathematically unequitable distribution of the resultant created goods, in effect stealing directly from the people making value. To be clear I’m not making the Labor Theory of Value argument - I’m simply demonstrating that by capitals own standard (increase in value based on capital labor mix) capital should get no excess return. In fact the only argument capitialists have left is the contract and this is the Mises style MaximumCapitalist like Hans Hoppe. The argument goes that as long as a contract is signed, there cannot be anything unethical.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  If we simplify away the personal issue of 'that's my truck; you'll have to pay me to use it' - we forget property rights and the psychological attachment to property, which I don't think is realistic or wise. (Also, I've recently been reading about 'cultural universals' - behaviors in all/most/many unrelated cultures through time and geography that are not biologically determined (as far as we know) - and property is one of them.) I'm sure you know the next issue: How in your system is capital efficiently allocated? The issue is not hoarding (or not necessarily), it's natural scarcity of capital. How do we decide who gets to use the truck or the property, etc.? We know the capitalist method of allocation, which is rather productive in aggregate. Other methods have been unproductive, broadly speaking. First come first serve? Also, the worker in your system gets all the return. Great. Now they have some money and they buy a truck. But now they own capital, the truck and hopefully some cash left over. Must they lend it to someone else without return? I dunno, but they might not be happy with that!
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    To your question on property: The claim that the idea of private property ownership is universal is just incorrect. Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/property/ch04.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho... (You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular) Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such. How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism. Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it. Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html Thanks for the debate