Sales create jobs, not the rich

[phattonez]

Yea, they can get a job, I got that.

You are taking a macroeconomic topic, and then applying a microeconomic solution. It don't work like that.

You'll need more of a proof than "it don't work like that".

 

[cmakaioz]

What I'm saying is that just trying to increase demand by giving people more money isn't actually going to produce the change that you think it will.

I haven't specifically mentioned any changes I'd expect from printing and distributing money, but now that you mention it, I'd expect that many people would be greatly helped by it.

People can spend what they can spend because they produce what they do.

WRONG. Since income is NOT reliably anchored to actual production (for better and for worse), one's purchasing power has no reliable relationship to actual production. Title-income in particular distorts the would-be relationship between production and purchasing power beyond recognition. Simply owning an apartment building may draw thousands of dollars a month in income, yet produces NOTHING. Owning shares of stock may lead to a few dollars of income or hundreds of thousands (depending on the number and value of shares at time of dividend or sale)...and yet produces NOTHING.

That's it. You can try to distort that with money printing, but all that you'll really be changing is the time preference artificially. And what happens when people try to reassert their true time preference.

What on earth are you babbling about now? Purchase economies which already allow a wide range of sources of unearned incomes are ALREADY grossly distorted. The point of *limited* printing of money is that -- unlike personal finance -- a monetarily sovereign state doesn't lose its holdings or get evicted for not repaying its debt.

Can money printing be done badly or have negative consequences? Of course it can. It is not, however, some ungodly or automatic economic suicide, and in the appropriate circumstances it can be quite beneficial.

The only way to really increase economic activity permanently is to increase production of the items and services that people want. This lowers real prices and increases standard of living.

Increasing vs. decreasing per se is not the problem. The problem is basic market failure -- people ready and willing to work but without jobs, businesses ready and willing to provide goods and services but without customers, but both languishing from lack of funds -- all brought on in no small part by the massive distortions and disparities enabled by practices like title-income.

We could double or triple global economic output, but without serious institutional and structural changes, we'd still have such market failures, still have massive poverty, want, and completely unnecessary suffering and waste.

Printing out of a crisis is not some blanket unconditional license to just flood the economy with new money with no consideration of its use. It's not an all-or-nothing switch with two silly options of Print Nothing vs. Print Money For Anything Anyone Wants. It can be implemented in such a way as to spur job creation (in situations of obvious market failure) to get things moving again without spiraling into runaway inflation.

For example, I have two businesses I'd love to get off the ground, but:

1) I don't have the personal funds to do so (indeed...I'm quite broke at the moment), and at current rates it will take me several years to have even half of what I'd need for financing the startup. So-called "angel" investors, even if I were to find some of them, are still premised upon receiving unconscionable amounts of unearned return on their investment (without producing anything)...and so my business plans are stuck on the shelf for the foreseeable future.

2) Even if I could afford it, right now only one of the two businesses I'd like to start is feasible within the current economic climate, in which customers/clients are largely in the Pay-Essentials-And-Hang-On-To-Everything-Else-With-A-White-Knuckled-Death-Grip mode.

I am one of many examples of people (and potential businesses) who/which stand to benefit greatly from expanded access to funds, whether by being granted loans on good terms, or simply having better paying work such that I'd have some time left over to work on either or both of my businesses (I work 7 days a week and some evenings at the moment). That's increased production just waiting to happen, but it's left frozen and undone due to lack of funds.

 

[imagep]

You'll need more of a proof than "it don't work like that".

So do you.

 

[imagep]

I'm trying to address several things at the same time.

First, I'm trying to point out the simple fact that holding title to something, trading title to something, and all combinations of the two...never produce anything at all. EVER. A big chunk of market fundamentalism is premised on the pretense that basically the sky would fall and/or we'd all still be in the stone age were it not for some elite minority class of risk-taking people who carry the rest of humanity on their backs. Yet a major principle in the work ethic which has taken hold in the United States is that people who work hard and live and play by the rules (whether laws, norms, customs, or all three) should not end up with their livelihood so frequently in question. In order to try to stave off the tension between these two (created by the routine observation that many people work quite hard and get nowhere, and a small minority of people barely lift a finger and live off of others through severe examples of unearned income), market fundamentalists twist themselves into ideological knots until they eventually settle upon an implication that risk itself actually produces things, and therefore financial risk is somehow a critical part of production. This rationalization is of course complete bull****, and so I've been trying to simply get acknowledgement of the fact that neither holding title to something, nor risking the value attached to such title, ever actually produces anything.

Next, I've been highlighting the absurd situations produced from allowing title-income to reach the extremes it has today in order to point out that the real wealth associated with obtaining high title-income still has to come from somewhere, and so in this limited sense such coercive economic situations are ultimately zero-sum: title-income leeched off the backs of producers has to come from somewhere...and if it is funneled to title-holders, it is effectively a cut taken out of the potential incomes or returns which could otherwise have gone to producers (workers).

I'm not completely against title-income, but for all intents and purposes I might as well be, because in a sane and cooperative economic system, there would be neither the call nor the need for it. I can conceive of very limited forms of title-income which I could tolerate, but I'd much rather just take the plunge and work towards (and in) systems in which people aren't even concerned with trying to "get over" or "break through" or "hit the jackpot" in order to get by...because they are already consistently and comfortably taken care of from cradle to grave with substantial (but not arduous) effort.

Ethically speaking, holding title to something doesn't warrant income at all, given that holding title to something is not a reliable indicator of any particular relationship to production. This does not mean I'm against all forms of unearned income, but title-income tends to become concentrated in exactly the kind of absurd and disparate arrangements you describe in your next post, such that a handful of title-holders may "hit the jackpot" as it were, and live primarily or completely off of the unearned income for the rest of their lives, while the majority of people remain under the yoke of variations of coercive servitude, in which they are systematically shortchanged for their work.

Finally, I was trying (though it's likely futile) to explain to Gonzo the fact that the practice of treating title as a basis for further (and indefinite) income is deeply contrived and politically contingent, rather than some falsely imagined self-obvious way to do things. The principle which holds that the *producers* of wealth are the default and rightful recipients of the returns or benefits of the products and services they provide is far more intuitive and popular, and the current norm -- in which few (if any) people in a workplace question the presumptive correctness or ethical standard by which business owners automatically receive the benefit of employee production and service -- is a fairly recent historical and political phenomenon in its current form (though it has some clear ancestors in feudalism, chattel slavery, and indentured servitude).

What if I built a house with me own two hands, with the intent of creating something of value, that someone else will enjoy. I then rent out the house. Is the rent not simply compensation for the value that I created? How is creating something of value then being paid for what I created, a little at a time, over a period of many years, any different than recieving payment for any other type of services rendered (like a regular job)?

 

[phattonez]

So do you.

I've offered the argument. Tell me what's wrong with it. Do people not ultimately trade goods for goods?

 

[phattonez]

I haven't specifically mentioned any changes I'd expect from printing and distributing money, but now that you mention it, I'd expect that many people would be greatly helped by it.

WRONG. Since income is NOT reliably anchored to actual production (for better and for worse), one's purchasing power has no reliable relationship to actual production. Title-income in particular distorts the would-be relationship between production and purchasing power beyond recognition.

Let's look at wages, then. Do wages not tend toward marginal productivity? Of course they do. Then let's get to your next point.

Simply owning an apartment building may draw thousands of dollars a month in income, yet produces NOTHING. Owning shares of stock may lead to a few dollars of income or hundreds of thousands (depending on the number and value of shares at time of dividend or sale)...and yet produces NOTHING.

It produces nothing? Tell me, why else would anyone own an apartment building? They need to make money to make the investment worthwhile. Look at the situation without rent. The structure does not get built, and the supply of housing decreases. Ok, you say, but what if it is already built? Well, someone sold the property, right? So the owner paid a lot of money for the building. The only way he gets that money back is by charging rent. Well does the building even need an owner, you might say? Sure, but then who is going to pay for the maintenance since disregarding maintenance would start to affect other residents. The residents themselves could own the building, but they would still need to pay rent for maintenance, property taxes, etc.

So while you say earning rent may not be productive, you're certainly not looking at it from the perspective of the tenant, who needs that building to have a place to live.

What on earth are you babbling about now? Purchase economies which already allow a wide range of sources of unearned incomes are ALREADY grossly distorted. The point of *limited* printing of money is that -- unlike personal finance -- a monetarily sovereign state doesn't lose its holdings or get evicted for not repaying its debt.

Malinvestment.

Can money printing be done badly or have negative consequences? Of course it can. It is not, however, some ungodly or automatic economic suicide, and in the appropriate circumstances it can be quite beneficial.

Malinvestment. Cantillon effects.

Increasing vs. decreasing per se is not the problem. The problem is basic market failure -- people ready and willing to work but without jobs, businesses ready and willing to provide goods and services but without customers, but both languishing from lack of funds -- all brought on in no small part by the massive distortions and disparities enabled by practices like title-income.

You're not answering the question of why there is such massive unemployment. Tell me what happens when you have an economy based on the economic demands of 10 years ago and you try to prop up that system of production and distribution in the current day? Do you think that would be a recipe for success, growth, and employment? Yet that's essentially what we're doing. We are not allowing production to shift to current or even future demands.

We could double or triple global economic output, but without serious institutional and structural changes, we'd still have such market failures, still have massive poverty, want, and completely unnecessary suffering and waste.

You'd have to be a utopian to think that we could ever eradicate suffering, poverty, want, and waste. These are facts of human existence. The goal is to minimize them, but they can never be eliminated.

Printing out of a crisis is not some blanket unconditional license to just flood the economy with new money with no consideration of its use. It's not an all-or-nothing switch with two silly options of Print Nothing vs. Print Money For Anything Anyone Wants. It can be implemented in such a way as to spur job creation (in situations of obvious market failure) to get things moving again without spiraling into runaway inflation.

Except you're still not seeing the problem of any money printing at all. First you have Cantillon effects. Then you have malinvestment, which also has the problems of creating exceeding difficulties in accounting.

For example, I have two businesses I'd love to get off the ground, but:

1) I don't have the personal funds to do so (indeed...I'm quite broke at the moment), and at current rates it will take me several years to have even half of what I'd need for financing the startup. So-called "angel" investors, even if I were to find some of them, are still premised upon receiving unconscionable amounts of unearned return on their investment (without producing anything)...and so my business plans are stuck on the shelf for the foreseeable future.

People want a return on their money and you think that's unreasonable, and then you get mad that you can't find investors? That's rich.

2) Even if I could afford it, right now only one of the two businesses I'd like to start is feasible within the current economic climate, in which customers/clients are largely in the Pay-Essentials-And-Hang-On-To-Everything-Else-With-A-White-Knuckled-Death-Grip mode.

Then you should ditch the latter business since there doesn't seem to be any demand for it.

I am one of many examples of people (and potential businesses) who/which stand to benefit greatly from expanded access to funds, whether by being granted loans on good terms, or simply having better paying work such that I'd have some time left over to work on either or both of my businesses (I work 7 days a week and some evenings at the moment). That's increased production just waiting to happen, but it's left frozen and undone due to lack of funds.

It sounds like you should find new ideas then, rather than blaming the economy or consumers for not allowing/liking it.

 

[imagep]

I've offered the argument. Tell me what's wrong with it. Do people not ultimately trade goods for goods?

I've also offered the arguement, and I have explained to you over and over what's wrong with your arguement.

 

[cmakaioz]

What if I built a house with me own two hands, with the intent of creating something of value, that someone else will enjoy. I then rent out the house. Is the rent not simply compensation for the value that I created?

Rent for living space is, in the vast majority of cases, coercive extraction.

If you rent out the place on a rent-to-own basis, then that might approach something like turning the rent into compensation for the functional worth of what you created; it would be a finite amount which could be paid off, and the payments of the tenant wouldn't vanish down the rent hole.

If you rent out the place normally, on the other hand, the renter is simply forking over unearned income (rent) to you because of the disparity in your respective levels of bargaining power, i.e. all the feasible living spaces are under lock and key, and so the renter must pay SOMEONE (or in the case of companies or corporations, someTHING) for what effectively amounts to the privilege of having a space in which to live. Under such an arrangement, the tenant is paying in order to stave off homelessness, and no matter how long they rent from you...as soon as they stop paying rent, they face homelessness. In the mean time, you take in rent (which-- beyond minor maintenance expenses -- you can then use for further investment or purchase, whatever you like) which enriches you. Over a long enough time, you as an owner may receive more in rent than what it cost to obtain the property in the first place; beyond basic human mortality you (or your heirs) have no built-in limit on how much unearned income you might receive from holding title to the rental house.

If everyone was guaranteed a safe and comfortable living space, then there would likely still be rentals, but they would be for specialized or luxury purposes, not for everyday living. As such, landlords/lessors routinely take advantage of systemic coercion because the threat of homelessness is what enables them to charge rent in the first place. People don't pay rent because they enjoy it; they pay rent because under present circumstances the failure to do so means homelessness. This is similar to how employers (without regard to their personal intent or their participation in supporting a business with their own work) routinely take advantage of systemic coercion with regard to hiring people; no single employer can reasonably be said to have created the condition of surplus labor, but nearly all of them are still routinely underpaying employees because the threat of unemployment (made real by the presence of plenty of unemployed people willing to take their place) keeps wages below what the employer receives as return on the work of employees.

How is creating something of value then being paid for what I created, a little at a time, over a period of many years, any different than recieving payment for any other type of services rendered (like a regular job)?

Rent is NOT payment for service, nor is it payment for creating anything at all. Most landlords didn't build the rental properties they own, but even (as in your example) if you did, the point remains that it's possible to charge rent in the first place only because of the artificial requirement that people must pay to have a living space. Whether you built the rental house or not, the basis of the rent is not the existence of the house, but the requirement of purchase-based access to living spaces. Rent is paid for TIME TO LIVE WITHOUT THREAT OF EVICTION. If renters were paying for the house or apartment they are renting, then they'd eventually own their place after paying a sufficient sum...this is of course not the typical practice.

Once a property manager or rental realtor or similar agent has carried out the paperwork and made arrangements for receiving ongoing payment from a tenant, there's very little the owner of the property is required to do him or herself. The practical tasks of maintenance and collecting rent can be delegated to others, and the landlord basically just sits pretty and receives rent. Is this free to the landlord? Of course not...real estate is phenomenally expensive and there are indeed obvious opportunity costs to purchasing and renting out a building vs., say, going shopping for photography gear or taking a luxurious vacation around the world. However, lost opportunity cost is still NOT production or service. "Not Going To Tahiti" does not, in itself, produce anything.

Rent is the compensation sufficiently wealthy people get for being in a better material circumstance than renters. The landlord need not DO anything (aside from stay alive and perhaps show ID when depositing rent checks). Building a rental property directly changes nothing, as the rent paid is not for the house or apartment, but for purchasing a limited period of time free from eviction.

 

[cmakaioz]

Let's look at wages, then. Do wages not tend toward marginal productivity?

It doesn't matter what they do or don't tend to...they're not based upon productivity, but bargaining power. You can be very productive, but work in a low-demand field...and (if you're lucky enough to have a job in the first place), you wages will be low.

While we're at it, people doing the same type of work as you -- but in a different country with different legal protections -- will often be paid less. Are they less productive? No. Do they have less bargaining power? YES.

It produces nothing? Tell me, why else would anyone own an apartment building?

Can you read? Do you understand the fact that INCOME is not PRODUCTION?!? Of course, most people purchasing an apartment building do so with the intention of renting it out for a profit. RENTING OUT A BUILDING IS NOT PRODUCTION. You are proving my point: income is not reliably anchored to production.

They need to make money to make the investment worthwhile. Look at the situation without rent. The structure does not get built,

You seem unable to differentiate between the real requirements of production (knowledge, material, work) vs. the artificial political requirements of specific distribution systems (i.e. PURCHASING goods and services).

Here's an easy test as to whether you understand the difference:

? How much money does it take to build an aircraft carrier, a church, a fedora, a particle accelerator, and a wedding dress?

**If you DON'T get it, you might start tallying up in your head what the purchase price might be for the materials and labor for producing such things under a purchase-based system like that we live under today.**

If you DO understand the difference between real vs. artificial requirements, then the answer is simple and obvious:

It takes NO MONEY AT ALL to produce any of those things. The financial exchanges we are used to deal with establishing the consent and cooperation of the many people involved in doing the actual production...but such trading and negotiation (with production as the ultimate goal) is NOT the production itself.

and the supply of housing decreases. Ok, you say, but what if it is already built? Well, someone sold the property, right? So the owner paid a lot of money for the building. The only way he gets that money back is by charging rent. Well does the building even need an owner, you might say? Sure, but then who is going to pay for the maintenance since disregarding maintenance would start to affect other residents. The residents themselves could own the building, but they would still need to pay rent for maintenance, property taxes, etc.

You are hopelessly locked into confusing purchase requirements -- which deal with the political contrivances tacked on top -- with real requirements, which are the same no matter what political or economic system is extant.

So while you say earning rent may not be productive,

Rent is not earned; it is unearned. This is not a normative label, but refers to the basis of the income. Landlords don't have to DO anything besides hold title to real estate in order to receive rent. Even the minimal paperwork and maintenance concerns can be delegated to someone else.

you're certainly not looking at it from the perspective of the tenant, who needs that building to have a place to live.

It doesn't matter whose perspective is at hand...no amount of passing funds or title back and forth, in any combination, ever produces anything. EVER. All production is the result of mixing labor (including comprehension and communication) with materials and natural processes.

Malinvestment. Cantillon effects.

You don't seem to have read what I wrote.

You're not answering the question of why there is such massive unemployment.

No one thus far has asked me. Do you always expect people to answer questions without being asked? Call me old-fashioned, but I generally prefer to address the topic I've identified or that has been laid out in a thread.

Tell me what happens when you have an economy based on the economic demands of 10 years ago and you try to prop up that system of production and distribution in the current day? Do you think that would be a recipe for success, growth, and employment? Yet that's essentially what we're doing. We are not allowing production to shift to current or even future demands.

What happens? Train wrecks like what we see now. That's capitalism...it's not based upon fulfilling needs or wants...it's based upon maximizing the consolidation of private profit. If and when meeting needs isn't found to be sufficiently profitable, it won't be done. Market demand isn't reflective of needs in the first place; rather, it's reflective of the desires (for humans) or imperatives (for fictional entities, like corporations) with sufficient purchasing power to influence economic activity.

You'd have to be a utopian to think that we could ever eradicate suffering, poverty, want, and waste. These are facts of human existence. The goal is to minimize them, but they can never be eliminated.

They are NOT facts of human existence...they are facts of living under coercion...falsely portrayed as universal -- rather than historically and politically contingent -- outcomes. Under the currently dominant system, societal ills are only addressed to the extent that doing so is compatible with preserving profit supremacy. Wherever private profit and societal benefit conflict --as they often do--private profit typically wins. That's NOT some inevitable outcome of any human system...that's a contingent outcome pushed and maintained by the priorities of the system we currently live under.

In any case, that's a thread in its own right, and doesn't change the fact that simply holding title to something is NOT production.

Except you're still not seeing the problem of any money printing at all. First you have Cantillon effects. Then you have malinvestment, which also has the problems of creating exceeding difficulties in accounting.

Once again, completely unresponsive. If you are asserting that ANY printing of money is automatic economic suicide, you're being silly. If you are attempting to pre-empt or anticipate some imagined argument on my part in favor of unconditional money printing with no concern for or awareness of POTENTIAL harm, then you're tilting at windmills. As I pointed out, EITHER extreme position is silly.

People want a return on their money and you think that's unreasonable, and then you get mad that you can't find investors? That's rich.

Wrong. I point out nuanced positions based upon facts instead of dogmatism, and your perspective is tone-deaf, such that you continually misrepresent my posts and ignore anything and everything which contradicts your false statements. That's not rich...it's just intellectually dishonest, boring, and (likely) a waste of time. The point in this specific example -- which clearly you missed entirely -- is that this is but one of many cases where access to funds could break an otherwise intractable stalemate, allowing me to break through some of the artificial obstacles to increased productivity.

Then you should ditch the latter business since there doesn't seem to be any demand for it.

Ah...so any business ideas not feasible right now, today, should be abandoned forever? Why not simply keep it on hold and bide my time? Is there some special reason you endorse giving up on an idea forever?!?

It sounds like you should find new ideas then, rather than blaming the economy or consumers for not allowing/liking it.

Once AGAIN, you win a gold medal in the 1500-meter Missing The Point Marathon: I'm not complaining...I'm pointing this out as an example of market failure which could be remedied with access to funding outside of the usual lending and investment channels!

You seem truly committed to running off track, ignoring the relevance of examples, and personalizing what was never raised as a personal matter in the first place...all to avoid confronting anything which contradicts your position. That's not argument or reason; it's denial.

 

[Neomalthusian]

Rent for living space is, in the vast majority of cases, coercive extraction.

If you rent out the place on a rent-to-own basis, then that might approach something like turning the rent into compensation for the functional worth of what you created; it would be a finite amount which could be paid off, and the payments of the tenant wouldn't vanish down the rent hole.

If you rent out the place normally, on the other hand, the renter is simply forking over unearned income (rent) to you because of the disparity in your respective levels of bargaining power, i.e. all the feasible living spaces are under lock and key, and so the renter must pay SOMEONE (or in the case of companies or corporations, someTHING) for what effectively amounts to the privilege of having a space in which to live.

I'm going to condense this for you: 1) People are free to charge others to use their property. 2) People are free not to pay to use someone else's property. 3) People are free to purchase their own property.

Under such an arrangement, the tenant is paying in order to stave off homelessness, and no matter how long they rent from you...as soon as they stop paying rent, they face homelessness.

When they stop paying rent they are defaulting on a previous mutual agreement to exchange money for the right to use one's property. The same happens if the owner stops paying the bank his mortgage payments. Just what in the hell are you trying to argue here?

In the mean time, you take in rent (which-- beyond minor maintenance expenses -- you can then use for further investment or purchase, whatever you like) which enriches you. Over a long enough time, you as an owner may receive more in rent than what it cost to obtain the property in the first place; beyond basic human mortality you (or your heirs) have no built-in limit on how much unearned income you might receive from holding title to the rental house.

You've never owned a home, clearly. Maintenance of a real property is not actually minor. And don't forget the cost of the mortgage payments, including the interest on it. When you add that to the maintenance of properties which constantly depreciate, it becomes a pretty close call. Google "rent vs. buy" and do some investigating. Assuming you're not brain damaged, it should enlighten you.

If everyone was guaranteed a safe and comfortable living space, then there would likely still be rentals, but they would be for specialized or luxury purposes, not for everyday living.

That's the way it is now. If I don't know that I will want to (or be able to) keep my job in this town over the long haul, I benefit immensely from being able to rent. Call that my "luxury" or my "specialized" reason for preferring to rent someone else's space, but in that scenario it benefits me hugely to be able to do so. If I lose my job or want to quit and move, it's extremely easier for me to do so if I'm renting than if I have to put my house on the market and sell. My god you seem profoundly oblivious to all this.

As such, landlords/lessors routinely take advantage of systemic coercion because the threat of homelessness is what enables them to charge rent in the first place.

Complete bull****. Maybe it's renters who take advantage of owners by extracting full living benefit out of a place, leaving a consistently deteriorated living space when they move out (over time) and never being on the hook for the taxes, renovations, repairs, tools to fix things, and the rest of the laundry list of expenditures that landlords face. It's comedically obvious you've never been in the position of being a homeowner or landlord, because it is anything but sitting back and raking in the bucks.

People don't pay rent because they enjoy it; they pay rent because under present circumstances the failure to do so means homelessness.

As does failure to pay the mortgage payments, so WTF is the difference?

This is similar to how employers (without regard to their personal intent or their participation in supporting a business with their own work) routinely take advantage of systemic coercion with regard to hiring people; no single employer can reasonably be said to have created the condition of surplus labor, but nearly all of them are still routinely underpaying employees because the threat of unemployment (made real by the presence of plenty of unemployed people willing to take their place) keeps wages below what the employer receives as return on the work of employees.

You are implying that, when someone is willing to work the same job for less compensation, the employer should not be allowed to accept that person's offer. There is no escaping the supply and demand effects of labor.

Rent is NOT payment for service, nor is it payment for creating anything at all. Most landlords didn't build the rental properties they own, but even (as in your example) if you did, the point remains that it's possible to charge rent in the first place only because of the artificial requirement that people must pay to have a living space. Whether you built the rental house or not, the basis of the rent is not the existence of the house, but the requirement of purchase-based access to living spaces. Rent is paid for TIME TO LIVE WITHOUT THREAT OF EVICTION.

You are crazy. Literally crazy. Rent is payment to use property belonging to another for a specified period of time. The renter/lessee MIGHT pay a premium in exchange for not having to assume the long-term financial risks of ownership of that which he wants to rent. Overall though your attempts to cast renters as victims is mind-boggling bat**** crazy.

If renters were paying for the house or apartment they are renting, then they'd eventually own their place after paying a sufficient sum...this is of course not the typical practice.

Yes it is. People are essentially renting-to-own their homes from banks, and this is very typical practice. Some people negotiate terms of a purchase contract with owners independently of banks, and this too is not that uncommon.


This post I just responded to was quite possibly the most insane post I think I've ever seen around here.

 

[Gonzo Rodeo]

This is also the case with regards to employees. Wage workers' work income is not set according to ability, but according to their bargaining power. The most astonishingly talented custodian...will still get relatively low pay because there are more possible custodians out there. A mediocre heart surgeon, on the other hand, will (short of losing their medical license) still likely have a very high income. Further examples abound, but the point here is that NO, the markets we actually live under are NOT meritocratic, and there are many ways in which profit supremacy -- including the practice of title-income -- works heavily AGAINST meritocracy.

You honestly don't see the merit in someone who is able to cope with the rigors of being a heart surgeon, over someone who can only be a janitor? The worlds needs both janitors and heart surgeons, and one could even make the argument that the world would be better off if there were more heart surgeons than janitors.... but the people with the innate dexterity to even be able to practice surgery, let alone possess the wherewithal to attend med school and then, you know, actually cut into other people, are few. Conversely, there are no special skills that a janitor needs. He just needs to clean stuff. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The BEST janitor in the world is still not worth the WORST heart surgeon, in terms of value to society.

You're entire argument is invalidated by this one simple fact.

Why do we pay heart surgeons more than we pay janitors? Because what they do is more valuable to society than what janitors do. Welcome to the free market system, and the conversation.

In terms of wealth (resource) management, those who can create vast sums of wealth and then hold onto those vast sums are able to do things that other people cannot do. Warren Buffet, for example, made his fortune buying struggling businesses, and then restructuring those companies to produce profit, usually while maintaining the old staff in it's entirety. How does Buffet do this, when those companies already had managers and owners and investors? I don't know how he does it, either. But he does it. And for that, he has been handsomely rewarded. Buffet's skills are valuable, much more so than those managers he retrains.

QED

 

[lpast]

You honestly don't see the merit in someone who is able to cope with the rigors of being a heart surgeon, over someone who can only be a janitor? The worlds needs both janitors and heart surgeons, and one could even make the argument that the world would be better off if there were more heart surgeons than janitors.... but the people with the innate dexterity to even be able to practice surgery, let alone possess the wherewithal to attend med school and then, you know, actually cut into other people, are few. Conversely, there are no special skills that a janitor needs. He just needs to clean stuff. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The BEST janitor in the world is still not worth the WORST heart surgeon, in terms of value to society.

You're entire argument is invalidated by this one simple fact.

Why do we pay heart surgeons more than we pay janitors? Because what they do is more valuable to society than what janitors do. Welcome to the free market system, and the conversation.

In terms of wealth (resource) management, those who can create vast sums of wealth and then hold onto those vast sums are able to do things that other people cannot do. Warren Buffet, for example, made his fortune buying struggling businesses, and then restructuring those companies to produce profit, usually while maintaining the old staff in it's entirety. How does Buffet do this, when those companies already had managers and owners and investors? I don't know how he does it, either. But he does it. And for that, he has been handsomely rewarded. Buffet's skills are valuable, much more so than those managers he retrains.

QED

Everyone realizes that skilled professionals and skilled workers are of more value than unskilled. Medical Drs along with years of training in the skills needed also have tremendous responsiblity, they are dealing with life and death.

I think the issue is more narrow and directed at the business types..CEOs who have given themselves amazing increases in pay and bonus while stripping their labor force of everything they can take off them...janitors provide a service and they dont deserve to get rich..but they deserve to make a living and have somewhat of a future...<social security, medicare> when they are too old to work. The new far right GOP: believes janitors are worth nothing therefore deserve nothing

 

[cmakaioz]

I'm going to condense this for you: 1) People are free to charge others to use their property.

I invite you to go raise that point with someone who has ever claimed otherwise. What the **** do you imagine yourself to be responding to?

2) People are free not to pay to use someone else's property.

Sure...they're free to be homeless. This is as vapid and disingenuous an observation as pointing out that people don't -- strictly speaking -- HAVE to have a job...they could dumpster-dive for food, live under bridges or in cardboard boxes in the park, etc.

3) People are free to purchase their own property.

Of COURSE they are. Funny thing is...the people who can afford to buy real estate have this strange habit of buying homes far, far more often than those who cannot afford to do so.

On similar grounds, I'm just as "free" to eat at five-star restaurants for all my meals as is a multi-millionaire...and yet...if you were to bet which one of us (me or the millionaire) would ever actually end up doing so -- even for a limited time -- most people would correctly predict that person to be the millionaire. Why do you think that is?

When they stop paying rent they are defaulting on a previous mutual agreement to exchange money for the right to use one's property. The same happens if the owner stops paying the bank his mortgage payments. Just what in the hell are you trying to argue here?

If you chose to read and/or follow the thread instead of wandering in randomly, you'd know that already.

Giving and receiving money and title -- in any direction and any combination -- is not production.

You've never owned a home, clearly. Maintenance of a real property is not actually minor.

You have failed to read correctly. The point was that the title-holder (the recipient of the title-income) need not PERSONALLY do whatever maintenance work or paperwork is required...they can hire someone to do THAT, too. RENT is NOT payment for service or production. Is any of this getting through?

And don't forget the cost of the mortgage payments, including the interest on it. When you add that to the maintenance of properties which constantly depreciate, it becomes a pretty close call. Google "rent vs. buy" and do some investigating. Assuming you're not brain damaged, it should enlighten you.

Assuming you're not brain damaged, is there any chance you might actually pay attention to the point being made and the topic at hand? No one -- myself included -- has claimed here in this thread that title-income is a guaranteed or challenge-free passport to unlimited riches. The point was--as above-- that the title-holder him/her/itself need not DO anything in order to receive the title-income (rent).

That's the way it is now.

No, it ****ing isn't. As things currently stand, people must PURCHASE living space. They are not guaranteed a safe and comfortable place to live...they must purchase short or long term access to one. A guaranteed safe and comfortable living space would mean we'd all have homes without reference to ability to pay.

If I don't know that I will want to (or be able to) keep my job in this town over the long haul, I benefit immensely from being able to rent.

You've missed it completely. The relevant contrast is not between renting vs. buying, but between having to pay for living space (rented or bought) in the first place vs. NOT having to pay for it.

Call that my "luxury" or my "specialized" reason for preferring to rent someone else's space, but in that scenario it benefits me hugely to be able to do so. If I lose my job or want to quit and move, it's extremely easier for me to do so if I'm renting than if I have to put my house on the market and sell. My god you seem profoundly oblivious to all this.

No, you're simply arguing against phantoms. I never claimed that renting can't be more convenient than buying. The point at hand is that rental income for living spaces is normally derived from people NOT HAVING THE OPTION TO HAVE A DECENT PLACE TO LIVE UNLESS THEY PAY FOR IT.

Try to actually READ what you imagine yourself to be responding to.

Complete bull****.

Oh really? Renters aren't required to pay rent? Home-buyers aren't required to pay for their homes? Once again, illiteracy.

As does failure to pay the mortgage payments, so WTF is the difference?

The ****ing difference is that if people had the reliable option to NOT have to pay for a living space, guess what? Rental and purchase income would be based upon luxuries not necessities. I don't know if you're missing the point, or if you simply never made any real attempt to follow the discussion in the first place.

You are implying that, when someone is willing to work the same job for less compensation, the employer should not be allowed to accept that person's offer.

More illiteracy. I made no such claim, such a claim doesn't follow from what I wrote, and such a claim isn't even tangentially related to the topic at hand, which was/is the point that someone's income is not reliably anchored to their contribution to production.

Based upon your post, it seems like you just felt like arguing against something, and you didn't care if what you're arguing against was even present in my post or not...you were just committed to defeating those windmills, and To Hell with paying attention or making sense.

You are crazy. Literally crazy.

I'm not the least bit crazy. You, on the other hand, are engaging in willful illiteracy either by choice or by genuine inability. I don't know or care which, but your post is a hysterical mess of nonresponsive babbling.

Rent is payment to use property belonging to another for a specified period of time.

YES. Perhaps the first thing you got right. And how is it that the owners are able to find people who will pay rent in the first place, hmm? Because most of the viable living spaces are already owned! What you're completely missing here is that the rent is not payment for DOING anything...it is payment for staving off/appeasing the ARTIFICIAL scarcity of living spaces. Why is this scarcity artificial? Because we have more than enough places to physically accommodate people in comfortable homes, and yet we still have plenty of people either without homes, or (far more common) living in spaces which don't work well for them. Why? Because of the inability to meet the ARTIFICIAL requirement that living spaces be PAID for.

The renter/lessee MIGHT pay a premium in exchange for not having to assume the long-term financial risks of ownership of that which he wants to rent.

You're skipping past something far more basic. Renters are paying a premium JUST TO HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE. You don't seem to grasp that this is not some inevitable thing. It's not required by nature that people pay for a place to simply live...that's a political and historically contingent requirement. Do gazelles and frogs and fish and birds pay rent?

Yes it is. People are essentially renting-to-own their homes from banks,

If you're paying a mortgage, you're buying a home. If you're renting, you're just buying time. In case you missed it, the words "Renter" and "renting" were in the sentence you (supposedly) were responding to for a reason. See, their presence influences the meaning of the sentence. Sort of like how the sentence "Richard had Cheerios for breakfast, and died of a heart attack after lunch today" has a different meaning than "Richard had Cheerios for breakfast."

This post I just responded to was quite possibly the most insane post I think I've ever seen around here.

WHAT post? Your failure to accurate read sentences in English means you didn't respond to what I posted. You babbled a bunch of hysterical nonsense based upon something, but who the hell knows what? It sure as hell wasn't what I wrote.

 

[Shadow Serious]

There are a few qualifiers for membership in the Logical Party.

1) You can't consider yourself Right Wing, Conservative or Republican
2) You can't consider yourself Left Wing, Liberal or Democrat.
3) Your focus should be to pretty much disregard the very rich and the professionally poor and devote yourself to the interests of the middle class, who are the economic engine of this country.
4) You must eschew passion and regard only logic, even if that logic doesn't fulfill your fantasies.
5) You must accept that morality can not be legislated effectively.
6) You must accept that Corporations, while composed of individuals, are not in themselves sentient beings, and that their purpose is to generate profits, not to manage society.

Here are a few platform proposals. Some are much less serious than others.

1) Abortion should be legal with a lifetime limit of 2. Rape and incest excepted. Should you require a 3rd abortion, you will be sterilized. Both males and females will be tracked.
2) In certain cases, abortion is mandatory and retroactive.
3) The Social Security system is to be replaced with the Mandatory Savings Account. The MSA will take 10% of your income, employers will contribute another 5%, funds will be invested in 75% treasury bills that expire when you will turn 65. 25% can be invested in a limited choice of Mutual Funds. When you turn 67, you will be evaluated actuarially and funds will be distributed to you over your estimated remaining lifespan. Should you die prior to the expected date, the remaining funds go to your estate.
4) You will need a permit to have a child. This permit costs $1,000.00 and the funds go into the child's MSA.
5) Medical Insurance will be mandatory. There will be a self-sustaining Public Option insurance company which will offer mediocre coverage.
6) Any bureaucrat who carries a gun and has arrest authority may be randomly drug and lie detector tested.
7) Politician's do not receive lifetime benefits. They are public servants and should not receive greater or separate rewards than any mid-level corporation.

Ah, well, this list could get pretty long so I'll STFU.

Specklebang for President. Because it can't possibly get any worse.

I'm libertarian so I dont know where i would fall in on Part A 1,2.

I suppose it is the middle peoples turn now for Part A3.

While I do support using reason as the primary focurs on policy, we must remember that we live in a human society and cannot solely use reason (logic) alone. Also we must have limiters on what we can allow for the government to do for and on behalf of society. Part A4.

Agreed morality cannot be enforced by the government. The best government can do is avoid situations that would impar moral ablities in society. Part A5.

Agreed corperations (for profit) are not intended to promote policies supported by people outside of the corperations. Part A6.


I'm a constitutionalist libertarian and would require that such would need to admended. I would allow abortion in first trimester for the States to decide under Admn 10. Forced sterilization is anathma to some religious beliefs. I would need to know the reasoning to have this accepted. part B1

Under what circumstances would abortion be required? I cannot approve that. part B2

I could accept a mandatory retirement account in which one invests in Index funds but I DO NOT accept one in which one is reqired to have the bulk in Treasuries. Treasuries are not a good investment over all. And one would be denied the benefits of investing in Stocks by index funds which is incresae of value in the market. Treasuries just sit there and draw interest. The government has too much debt now anyway. Part B3.

I appreciate the need to be responsible when having a child I wold suggest first to end those federal government programs that support unwed mothers first before going to an extreme of having to have permits having a child. I do not need to mention the potential of abuse of such policy do I? Part B4

I do not support mandatory insurance as long as UHC is a possibility. I would onnly support reqirement of major medical (administrated on a State level) Part B5.

By and large I think B6 is in place and is appropriate.

for B7 I can only agree. Politicialns should not have a lifetime membership a the public troff.

 

[cmakaioz]

You honestly don't see the merit in someone who is able to cope with the rigors of being a heart surgeon, over someone who can only be a janitor?

Completely irrelevant. Stop. Go back. Read the post you are pretending to respond to. See if you can figure out the point of what I wrote (it's NOT hidden).

Here...I'll give you some help by bolding and enlarging the point you're missing:

This is also the case with regards to employees. Wage workers' work income is not set according to ability, but according to their bargaining power. The most astonishingly talented custodian...will still get relatively low pay because there are more possible custodians out there. A mediocre heart surgeon, on the other hand, will (short of losing their medical license) still likely have a very high income. Further examples abound, but the point here is that NO, the markets we actually live under are NOT meritocratic, and there are many ways in which profit supremacy -- including the practice of title-income -- works heavily AGAINST meritocracy.

Did that help? Did you notice the relevant sentence now?

The worlds needs both janitors and heart surgeons, and one could even make the argument that the world would be better off if there were more heart surgeons than janitors.... but the people with the innate dexterity to even be able to practice surgery, let alone possess the wherewithal to attend med school and then, you know, actually cut into other people, are few.

The bolded part keeps far, far more people out of becoming a doctor than anything remotely related to ability.

Stop and THINK for a second. Do most people do the job they do because that's the absolute limit of what they're capable of (in practical terms)? Or, instead, because that's a compromised and momentary "best" thing they can get someone to PAY them to do? Do you honestly believe, for even a moment, that more than a tiny handful among pizza delivery drivers or theater snack bar cashiers are in THAT particular job because they LITERALLY can't manage to handle anything else? If so, then you have a profound level of class bigotry warping your worldview and blinding you to your own (and everyone else's) potential.

Reality check: most people aren't doing anything close to the best of their ability, and indeed haven't even had the chance to find out (through study, trial and error, and the necessary institutional support) either what they'd be really good at doing and (since it is different) what the limits of their abilities are in a few (let alone many) possible endeavors. Most people muddle along, struggle to find something they can tolerate (and that they're decent enough at doing such that they can keep their job), and then they settle for that because they can't take time off (gotta pay that rent and feed the family) to explore their own potentials.

Conversely, there are no special skills that a janitor needs. He just needs to clean stuff. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The BEST janitor in the world is still not worth the WORST heart surgeon, in terms of value to society.

The point you're missing is that you claimed that people are paid according to their productivity. I pointed out that this is false: they are paid according to their BARGAINING POWER. Believe it or not, there's an actual TOPIC for this thread, and that claim (and my disproof of your claim) happen to be relevant to it!

You're entire argument is invalidated by this one simple fact.

It is NOT a fact that the best janitor is still not worth the worst heart surgeon. It is an opinion. It is possibly a fact that the worst heart surgeon (still working as a heart surgeon) is still PAID MORE than the best janitor. Do you understand the difference, in both type and truth-value, between those two statements?

Why do we pay heart surgeons more than we pay janitors? Because what they do is more valuable to society than what janitors do.

WRONG. Because they have more bargaining power. Opinions may vary or they may be consistent about the societal worth of janitors vs. heart surgeons, but that's NOT why the latter are paid more. Correlation is not causation. If people were paid according to their societal value (not the same thing as commercial value), then you wouldn't hear anyone lamenting the fact that professional athletes make more than teachers, or that the financial speculators who train-wrecked the economy have higher incomes than cancer researchers.

Welcome to the free market system, and the conversation.

We're not in a free market system...just a market system.

In terms of wealth (resource) management, those who can create vast sums of wealth and then hold onto those vast sums are able to do things that other people cannot do. Warren Buffet, for example, made his fortune buying struggling businesses, and then restructuring those companies to produce profit, usually while maintaining the old staff in it's entirety. How does Buffet do this, when those companies already had managers and owners and investors? I don't know how he does it, either. But he does it. And for that, he has been handsomely rewarded. Buffet's skills are valuable, much more so than those managers he retrains.
QED

Buffett has immense bargaining power, no doubt. But while ability (real or perceived) MAY influence bargaining power it is not synonymous with it.

I will now remind you of the relevant point, lest you lapse into ignoring it once again:

Income under coercive systems (including global capitalism) is based upon bargaining power, NOT upon contribution to production or practical merit. This is demonstrated by all of the following, any one of which refutes the claim that income is a measure of contribution to production or of merit:

1. ability MAY influence bargaining power, but does not automatically do so (one may be very good at something and not receive more income for such ability);
2. societal value MAY influence bargaining power, but does not automatically do so (one may do something of dubious or even negative societal value and have a high income, just as one may do something of widely recognized societal value and receive little or nothing for it);
3. the practice of title-income enables massive incomes which have no requirement of contribution (weak or strong) AT ALL (this completely demolishes the notion that income tracks with ability or societal value, as title-income is completely disconnected from BOTH);

 

[Neomalthusian]

I invite you to go raise that point with someone who has ever claimed otherwise. What the **** do you imagine yourself to be responding to?

Sure...they're free to be homeless. This is as vapid and disingenuous an observation as pointing out that people don't -- strictly speaking -- HAVE to have a job...they could dumpster-dive for food, live under bridges or in cardboard boxes in the park, etc.

That's true. People can choose to be homeless, dumpster dive, et cetera. Why are you acting like the folks who don't want to are victims because they have to pay for what they want?

Of COURSE they are. Funny thing is...the people who can afford to buy real estate have this strange habit of buying homes far, far more often than those who cannot afford to do so.

Since 2009 anyway. Do you want it some other way? We learned a hard lesson about that recently.

You have failed to read correctly. The point was that the title-holder (the recipient of the title-income) need not PERSONALLY do whatever maintenance work or paperwork is required...they can hire someone to do THAT, too. RENT is NOT payment for service or production. Is any of this getting through?

These are true statements, but they're not compelling in terms of whatever your point is. Why do housing arrangements need to be something you feel comfortably defining as "production?"

Assuming you're not brain damaged, is there any chance you might actually pay attention to the point being made and the topic at hand? No one -- myself included -- has claimed here in this thread that title-income is a guaranteed or challenge-free passport to unlimited riches. The point was--as above-- that the title-holder him/her/itself need not DO anything in order to receive the title-income (rent).

But it behooves them to do so, lest their tenant seek a better deal on a rental agreement elsewhere. I've rented crappy places too, usually at a discount. When I could afford better and wanted to pay more for better, I did.

No, it ****ing isn't. As things currently stand, people must PURCHASE living space.

Why shouldn't they?

They are not guaranteed a safe and comfortable place to live...they must purchase short or long term access to one. A guaranteed safe and comfortable living space would mean we'd all have homes without reference to ability to pay.

Can we all have mansions then? Pretty please?

You've missed it completely. The relevant contrast is not between renting vs. buying, but between having to pay for living space (rented or bought) in the first place vs. NOT having to pay for it.

There's no place short of fantasy that this concept of free property makes sense.

No, you're simply arguing against phantoms. I never claimed that renting can't be more convenient than buying. The point at hand is that rental income for living spaces is normally derived from people NOT HAVING THE OPTION TO HAVE A DECENT PLACE TO LIVE UNLESS THEY PAY FOR IT.

The ****ing difference is that if people had the reliable option to NOT have to pay for a living space, guess what? Rental and purchase income would be based upon luxuries not necessities. I don't know if you're missing the point, or if you simply never made any real attempt to follow the discussion in the first place.

Paying for property applies to every human being in every developed country in the world. Why are you bitching about it? Are you demanding a resource-based economy a la Jacques Fresco or something? Property costs money and there's nothing inherently wrong about that. It's like complaining that organisms have to try to survive in order to survive.

Try to actually READ what you imagine yourself to be responding to.

I am reading. I'm reading nonsense.

More illiteracy. I made no such claim, such a claim doesn't follow from what I wrote, and such a claim isn't even tangentially related to the topic at hand, which was/is the point that someone's income is not reliably anchored to their contribution to production.

My landlord contributed to my convenience in being able to rent his space, and he did so by being willing to assume the financial obligations and risks of ownership. I pay him for that.

YES. Perhaps the first thing you got right. And how is it that the owners are able to find people who will pay rent in the first place, hmm? Because most of the viable living spaces are already owned!

That's okay if most are. Because plenty are also not. Check your local real estate listings if you don't believe me.

What you're completely missing here is that the rent is not payment for DOING anything...

Yes, in a very real sense, it is. I pay my landlord to use space that belongs to him, to not have to repair or replace fixtures at my own expense, to be able to leave the premises somewhat financially risk-free, and to not have to subject myself to the risks of ownership if my circumstances don't guarantee my geographic longevity.

You're skipping past something far more basic. Renters are paying a premium JUST TO HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE.

Every human being in the country is paying to have a place to live.

You don't seem to grasp that this is not some inevitable thing. It's not required by nature that people pay for a place to simply live...that's a political and historically contingent requirement. Do gazelles and frogs and fish and birds pay rent?

There are ways to dodge most-if-not-all costs related to existing and being alive somewhere. They come with contingencies, however, namely willingness to accept some of the natural realities that things like frogs and fish and birds do. Specifically, they are not furnished with living spaces, and their ability to survive utterly depends on their ability to directly derive calories from their natural environments. We haven't lived this way for a long time. About 12,000 years or so. But it's still technically possible.

 

[cmakaioz]

Neo...as you're continuing in your serial failure (choice?) to not read accurately (not agree, mind you, just accurately comprehend and summarize what you read), I'm only going to address the following...

Paying for property applies to every human being in every developed country in the world. Why are you bitching about it?

I'm not bitching about anything. I'm pointing out facts, not (yet) making any normative case. You're so wound up and invested in hanging on to certain prejudices and fatalisms that you keep projecting onto me positions I don't hold, claims I'm NOT making, topics I'm NOT bringing up, etc.

Are you demanding a resource-based economy a la Jacques Fresco or something? Property costs money and there's nothing inherently wrong about that.

Within the context of this thread, I'm not demanding anything at all. I'm hoping that a rational exposition of relevant evidence will get some people to acknowledge the fact that holding or trading title, in any combination, is neither a requirement of nor a contributor to production.

*Normative* arguments are off the table...it's like pulling teeth in here just to get some people to acknowledge FACTS. Your next line demonstrates exactly this kind of stubborn blindness to the difference between real requirements of production vs. political requirements of specific (and historically contingent) systems:

It's like complaining that organisms have to try to survive in order to survive.

Wrong. It's not complaining about a god damn thing. It is the empirical observation of the fact that holding and transferring title never ever produces anything. EVER.

The relevance to the topic is that those who like to claim that rich people are saviors, without which the economy would grind to a halt and all progress as we know it would slow to a crawl were it not for the allegedly massive risk of investors, sooner or later cite investment as being a requirement of production.

IT ISN'T.

Finance -- in its entirety -- is absolutely UNnecessary for production. What financial arrangements ARE relevant to is to satisfying the artificial political requirements of specific purchase-based distribution systems.

That's why it takes ZERO dollars to make a battleship or a university library or a space shuttle. It takes a little or a lot of money, in a dizzying range of variations of negotiation and agreement, to persuade the relevant producers (the actual workers, which may or may not also be some owners) to participate in production **within a specific system of distribution**...but the real requirements of production are completely immune to politics...they're determined instead by physics, chemistry, communication needs, logistics, etc.

Buying, selling, and trading title...contribute **absolutely nothing** to production. The focus of buying, selling, and trading title is entirely a matter of satisfying artificial, not real, requirements of distribution, not production.

 

[Neomalthusian]

Neo...as you're continuing in your serial failure (choice?) to not read accurately (not agree, mind you, just accurately comprehend and summarize what you read), I'm only going to address the following...

I'm not bitching about anything. I'm pointing out facts, not (yet) making any normative case. You're so wound up and invested in hanging on to certain prejudices and fatalisms that you keep projecting onto me positions I don't hold, claims I'm NOT making, topics I'm NOT bringing up, etc.

You've indicated you don't think people should have to pay to have the right to live somewhere. I'm not wound up about that, but I have taken the opportunity to ridicule that idea, because it is worthy of ridicule.

Within the context of this thread, I'm not demanding anything at all. I'm hoping that a rational exposition of relevant evidence will get some people to acknowledge the fact that holding or trading title, in any combination, is neither a requirement of nor a contributor to production.

*Normative* arguments are off the table...it's like pulling teeth in here just to get some people to acknowledge FACTS. Your next line demonstrates exactly this kind of stubborn blindness to the difference between real requirements of production vs. political requirements of specific (and historically contingent) systems....

We both admit people are free to trade money for something they value. In the case of our recent posts, trading money for the right to occupy a living space. You continue to act as though there is something wrong with the fact that people voluntarily contract with one another to trade money for the right to occupy a space for living arrangements, and suggest that people ought to be able to have housing that costs them nothing.

 

[cmakaioz]

You've indicated you don't think people should have to pay to have the right to live somewhere. I'm not wound up about that, but I have taken the opportunity to ridicule that idea, because it is worthy of ridicule.

You ARE wound up about it, because you continue to ignore the factual points I'm making.

Whether you feel there's nothing wrong with most people being forced to pay for living space, or I feel there's something profoundly wrong with most people being forced to pay for a living space...IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE FACT ITSELF. This whole tangent started as part of another poster's mistaken premise that rent is payment for a **landlord** actually DOING something, when it isn't.

That's what I mean when I say you're wound up. You're so invested in mocking so much as the POSSIBILITY of doing things some other way that you're skipping past the basic recognition that paying for housing is an artificial political requirement of *distribution* systems (relating to access, NOT production).

We both admit people are free to trade money for something they value.

In the case of housing, we are NOT free to pay for housing...we are FORCED to pay for housing. It is this UNfreedom which enables the title-income known as rent.

In the case of our recent posts, trading money for the right to occupy a living space. You continue to act as though there is something wrong with the fact that people voluntarily contract with one another to trade money for the right to occupy a space for living arrangements,

Most people do NOT voluntarily contract to trade money for a living space. They TOLERATE it because they are FORCED to. The alternative under purchase-based systems of access is to not have a safe or comfortable living space at all.

The point you're missing, over and over and over like a Creationist, is that paying for living spaces -- no matter how common it is -- is NOT inevitable...it is an artificial political requirement of the distribution systems we are accustomed to (and I've never claimed otherwise)...but NOT a real requirement.

If you still deny this, then here are some obvious disproofs of your smug (and mistaken) premise to the contrary.

Humans have children from time to time...most of them don't charge their children rent (at least not until they're grown).
Humans often have elders/seniors live with them...most of them don't charge them rent, either.
Many nonprofit and religious groups arrange for living space for long-term volunteers.
etc.

Now, before your ideological tunnel vision derails you again, STOP. THINK.

Yes or No: does everyone pay for their living space? NO. Therefore, NO, it is NOT the case -- even living under coercive market conditions, that EVERYONE MUST pay for a space to live.

and suggest that people ought to be able to have housing that costs them nothing.

It is already a fact that people can have free housing. This is rarely done under conditions of profit supremacy (as pointed out above), but even then it's not unheard of. Now, instead of giggling like a little school kid at that supposedly crazy person with silly ideas, how about pausing and simply recognizing the FACT that rent is NOT a requirement of housing, but a requirement of the purchase-based system tacked on top of housing. This was, after all, the original point I raised, because it undermines the rationalization for claiming that we need rich people to have jobs or production.

 

[imagep]

You honestly don't see the merit in someone who is able to cope with the rigors of being a heart surgeon, over someone who can only be a janitor? The worlds needs both janitors and heart surgeons, and one could even make the argument that the world would be better off if there were more heart surgeons than janitors.... but the people with the innate dexterity to even be able to practice surgery, let alone possess the wherewithal to attend med school and then, you know, actually cut into other people, are few. Conversely, there are no special skills that a janitor needs. He just needs to clean stuff. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The BEST janitor in the world is still not worth the WORST heart surgeon, in terms of value to society.

You're entire argument is invalidated by this one simple fact.

Why do we pay heart surgeons more than we pay janitors? Because what they do is more valuable to society than what janitors do. Welcome to the free market system, and the conversation.

In terms of wealth (resource) management, those who can create vast sums of wealth and then hold onto those vast sums are able to do things that other people cannot do. Warren Buffet, for example, made his fortune buying struggling businesses, and then restructuring those companies to produce profit, usually while maintaining the old staff in it's entirety. How does Buffet do this, when those companies already had managers and owners and investors? I don't know how he does it, either. But he does it. And for that, he has been handsomely rewarded. Buffet's skills are valuable, much more so than those managers he retrains.

QED

I would have to argue that sanitation workers save far more lives than heart surgeons do. One of the key reason that we have less illness, and fewer plagues today is that we have lots of sanitation workers. If we had the percentage of deaths today that existed just a few hundred years ago from poor sanitation, we wouldn't need any heart surgeons because most of us would be dead long before any heart condition caused us a problem.

Also, we definately need far more sanitation workers than we do heart surgeons. Does every school really need a heart surgeon? Does every manufacturing plant need a heart surgeon? Does every large office building and every hotel need a heart surgeon?

So what would happen today if every heart surgeon retired? Certainly the rate of death by heart illness would increase, but that would cause far fewer deaths than if we lost all of our sanitation workers.

An hour of hard work is an hour of hard work, doesn't matter if it is an hour of a janitors time or an hour of a heart surgeons time, they are equally productive.

But wages are not determined by productivity, they are determined by supply and demand, thus highly skilled individuals who happen to have skills in areas of high demand will always receive a wage higher than a low skilled individual in any area of any demand level because low skilled workers are a dime a dozen.

 

[imagep]

What I'm saying is that just trying to increase demand by giving people more money isn't actually going to produce the change that you think it will. People can spend what they can spend because they produce what they do. That's it. You can try to distort that with money printing, but all that you'll really be changing is the time preference artificially. And what happens when people try to reassert their true time preference.

The only way to really increase economic activity permanently is to increase production of the items and services that people want. This lowers real prices and increases standard of living.

Now I am not for giving people money for nothing (..."and the chicks for free"), but if we did, and if those people increased their consumption, then we would produce more to meet that consumption, so our production would increase as a result of giving people money. Assumably additional jobs would be created to fulfill that production, and the new job holders would then purchase more, resulting in even more production, and jobs.

But no individual private capitalistic business is going to start producing products in excess of what they think that they can sell in the near future with the hope that if they just start producing all they can that consumers are going to consume all that can be produced.

Now if you can recommend a way to get all businesses to start simultaniously over producing the current market (thus creating additional jobs and increasing consumption), please let the POTUS know about it so that he can immediately take the action that is neccesary to make that happen.

 

[cmakaioz]

But wages are not determined by productivity, they are determined by supply and demand, thus highly skilled individuals who happen to have skills in areas of high demand will always receive a wage higher than a low skilled individual in any area of any demand level because low skilled workers are a dime a dozen.

Bingo.

Given the fact that one's bargaining power can change due to an influx of people in similar lines of work (i.e. having an excess of software engineers) or a temporary scarcity of them (a big storm wrecking the other shrimp boats in Forrest Gump)...all without changing the productivity or skills of a specific worker or job applicant, this is obvious demonstration that it's not productivity per se that sets wages (let alone incomes).

That something this easy to see is still denied by so many suggests the influence of ideology over evidence.

 

[imagep]

Bingo.

Given the fact that one's bargaining power can change due to an influx of people in similar lines of work (i.e. having an excess of software engineers) or a temporary scarcity of them (a big storm wrecking the other shrimp boats in Forrest Gump)...all without changing the productivity or skills of a specific worker or job applicant, this is obvious demonstration that it's not productivity per se that sets wages (let alone incomes).

That something this easy to see is still denied by so many suggests the influence of ideology over evidence.

Just adding on...

I would think that architects have high levels of skill, yet the compensation level for architects has plummeted in the past few years as their unemployment rate has risen to far above the average unemployment rate.

A couple of years ago I was attending a school board meeting where a proposal by an architectural firm was considered. The firm proposed giving the school district a huge discount on designing a generic school building, to be built on a unknown and yet to be purchased plot of land, at some unknown time in the future when the district may need an additional school. the architect admitted that his motivation was to keep his employees working because their customer base has disapeared. Fortunately our school board members had the common sense to turn down that offer.

The firm that he worked for went out of business shortly after that. He accepted a job with another architectural firm, who hired him not as an architect, but as a salesperson. The school district then retained the new company to be their official architectural firm. this just goes to prove that it is not so much job skills that matter, as it is who one knows.

 

[Neomalthusian]

You ARE wound up about it, because you continue to ignore the factual points I'm making.

Whether you feel there's nothing wrong with most people being forced to pay for living space, or I feel there's something profoundly wrong with most people being forced to pay for a living space...IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE FACT ITSELF. This whole tangent started as part of another poster's mistaken premise that rent is payment for a **landlord** actually DOING something, when it isn't.

I argue it is.

In the case of housing, we are NOT free to pay for housing...we are FORCED to pay for housing. Most people do NOT voluntarily contract to trade money for a living space. They TOLERATE it because they are FORCED to.

Forced? What, by our own preferences? That's not a correct use of the word "force." It is illegal to refuse to pay for (and hence to opt not to have) housing? No.

The point you're missing, over and over and over like a Creationist, is that paying for living spaces -- no matter how common it is -- is NOT inevitable...it is an artificial political requirement of the distribution systems we are accustomed to (and I've never claimed otherwise)...but NOT a real requirement.

So you would like housing to work... how? Genuinely curious.

Humans have children from time to time...most of them don't charge their children rent (at least not until they're grown).

Yes, that's because our law does not allow them to contract with others, hence they are the ones who are in fact entitled to safe housing that they don't pay for.

Humans often have elders/seniors live with them...most of them don't charge them rent, either.

Citation needed.

Many nonprofit and religious groups arrange for living space for long-term volunteers, etc.

Now, before your ideological tunnel vision derails you again, STOP. THINK.

Yes or No: does everyone pay for their living space? NO. Therefore, NO, it is NOT the case -- even living under coercive market conditions, that EVERYONE MUST pay for a space to live.

It is a reasonable generalization that adults pay for living space, and I find this to be somewhat of a natural manifestation of organizing a society that keeps people peaceful with their neighbors. Just because some (such as children) don't have to pay for the things they need doesn't mean it makes sense for adults. Yes or No?: you are advocating that private ownership cease.

It is already a fact that people can have free housing. This is rarely done under conditions of profit supremacy (as pointed out above), but even then it's not unheard of. Now, instead of giggling like a little school kid at that supposedly crazy person with silly ideas, how about pausing and simply recognizing the FACT that rent is NOT a requirement of housing, but a requirement of the purchase-based system tacked on top of housing. This was, after all, the original point I raised, because it undermines the rationalization for claiming that we need rich people to have jobs or production.

You can scream and shout that property is an artificial/political construct all you want, but I don't think whatever alternative it is that you have in mind is conceivable to most organized societies. It kind of just sounds like a convoluted theory has evolved out of your sense of resentment that you have to pay rent whereas children (for example) do not (because their legal guardians provide it to them).

 

[Gonzo Rodeo]

Completely irrelevant. Stop. Go back. Read the post you are pretending to respond to. See if you can figure out the point of what I wrote (it's NOT hidden).

Here...I'll give you some help by bolding and enlarging the point you're missing:
Did that help? Did you notice the relevant sentence now?

Bargaining power is value. I have addressed the point. A janitor has little bargaining power because a janitor can be replaced literally within a day. The amount of training necessary to bring a new janitor up to speed is so negligible it might as well be zero. A heart surgeon, on the other hand, represents a seven year course of collegiate study followed up with a grueling internship. Even a bad heart surgeon (let's say a 50% survival rate in his patients) is still a far harder commodity to replace in terms of human capital. Of COURSE the surgeon has more bargaining power. He simply brings more to the table.

Stop and THINK for a second. Do most people do the job they do because that's the absolute limit of what they're capable of (in practical terms)? Or, instead, because that's a compromised and momentary "best" thing they can get someone to PAY them to do? Do you honestly believe, for even a moment, that more than a tiny handful among pizza delivery drivers or theater snack bar cashiers are in THAT particular job because they LITERALLY can't manage to handle anything else? If so, then you have a profound level of class bigotry warping your worldview and blinding you to your own (and everyone else's) potential.

Some of those people are working while putting themselves through school, or as a part time job in addition to a different full time gig, or for any number of reasons. But I can confirm that when I delivered pizza at eighteen years of age, I worked with exactly zero doctors. In fact, the only person in the store with a college degree was the store manager. There is no class bigotry warping my worldview, just unfortunate facts learned through first hand experience.

Reality check: most people aren't doing anything close to the best of their ability, and indeed haven't even had the chance to find out (through study, trial and error, and the necessary institutional support) either what they'd be really good at doing and (since it is different) what the limits of their abilities are in a few (let alone many) possible endeavors. Most people muddle along, struggle to find something they can tolerate (and that they're decent enough at doing such that they can keep their job), and then they settle for that because they can't take time off (gotta pay that rent and feed the family) to explore their own potentials.

This is a ridiculous argument. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg is a really talented artist, even better than being a programmer. So what. He made a pile of money with social networking after revolutionizing both the communications industry and the advertising industry.

What you are essentially saying is that only those too ineffectual to do anything else should be the delivery drivers and janitors. I say let anyone be a delivery driver or a janitor who wants to be one. If they can do more, great, but they certainly don't have to. After all, delivery drivers and janitors have a marketable commodity: their labor. If they are performing a service that someone else is willing to pay them for, then more power to them. If they want more out of life, however, then they need to get their ass in gear. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so to speak.

The point you're missing is that you claimed that people are paid according to their productivity. I pointed out that this is false: they are paid according to their BARGAINING POWER. Believe it or not, there's an actual TOPIC for this thread, and that claim (and my disproof of your claim) happen to be relevant to it!

I never made that claim. That is a conflation, interjected by you. I was talking about value to society and individual investment into human capital. Society values heart surgeons, and their required human capital investment is immense; they are compensated accordingly, even if they aren't very good at surgery, because even the worst heart surgeon is a better surgeon than a janitor. With few exceptions of physical disability, anyone can be a janitor. While their services have an amount of value, their human capital investment requirement is minimal; as such, their compensation is lower.

It is NOT a fact that the best janitor is still not worth the worst heart surgeon. It is an opinion. It is possibly a fact that the worst heart surgeon (still working as a heart surgeon) is still PAID MORE than the best janitor. Do you understand the difference, in both type and truth-value, between those two statements?

If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to seek the services of a heart surgeon... I want you to talk to a janitor.

WRONG. Because they have more bargaining power. Opinions may vary or they may be consistent about the societal worth of janitors vs. heart surgeons, but that's NOT why the latter are paid more. Correlation is not causation. If people were paid according to their societal value (not the same thing as commercial value), then you wouldn't hear anyone lamenting the fact that professional athletes make more than teachers, or that the financial speculators who train-wrecked the economy have higher incomes than cancer researchers.

People want entertainment. Other people provide that entertainment for them. And the best of the best athletes command such high wages because they have immense bargaining power. But did you ever stop to ask yourself WHY they have such bargaining power? It's because people trade their resources for their entertainment, and club owners know that people pay more to see the better athletes on their teams. The better the team is, the longer that team stays in the season, which means MORE entertainment, and thus more revenue. Unfortunately, people would rather pay $150 for a Yankees ticket than donate $150 to cancer research, because they get a more immediate return on their investment. Again, those athletes provide a service to society that society rewards quite well.

Some teachers make good money, too, although not athlete kind of income. The best of the best teachers get employed by the top tier universities and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but just like in sports, there are many, many teachers that never "make it to the majors." Sports is a highly competitive profession, by nature, and only the best end up getting paid. Teaching, on the other hand, pays a living wage to a lot more teachers every day. An elementary school teacher doesn't make much, but they do usually get good benefits and summers off, whereas a minor league athlete doesn't get much, if anything. Athletes also work their butts off all year long, training and staying in shape, and again, only a tiny fraction of all potential athletes ever makes it "professionally."

We're not in a free market system...just a market system.

I completely agree. Our system is corrupted by many artificial, outside controls.

Buffett has immense bargaining power, no doubt. But while ability (real or perceived) MAY influence bargaining power it is not synonymous with it.

Buffet himself says that he is lucky to live in a time where doing what he does happens to pay very well. In this age of technology and bureaucracy, Buffet's management style (and that is exactly what he gets paid for, his management and structuring skills) is superior to many other methods, and after enough successes his reputation alone is valuable enough to raise a stock when people even think he might buy a company. He is the quintessential example of ability dictating worth.

I will now remind you of the relevant point, lest you lapse into ignoring it once again:

Income under coercive systems (including global capitalism) is based upon bargaining power, NOT upon contribution to production or practical merit. This is demonstrated by all of the following, any one of which refutes the claim that income is a measure of contribution to production or of merit:

1. ability MAY influence bargaining power, but does not automatically do so (one may be very good at something and not receive more income for such ability);
2. societal value MAY influence bargaining power, but does not automatically do so (one may do something of dubious or even negative societal value and have a high income, just as one may do something of widely recognized societal value and receive little or nothing for it);
3. the practice of title-income enables massive incomes which have no requirement of contribution (weak or strong) AT ALL (this completely demolishes the notion that income tracks with ability or societal value, as title-income is completely disconnected from BOTH);

I am not the one ignoring arguments here. Your first two bullet points are spot on, ability and societal value MAY influence bargaining power, but not necessarily. I totally agree. What you have not addressed from my argument yet is covered in your third point. You seem to claim physical labor as the only thing that SHOULD count as contribution and thus should be the only thing that SHOULD matter for bargaining power. But you have to conflate "contribution" with "physical labor" in order for this to work. What you continue to ignore is that one who continues to live and make money with only investments does so by CONTRIBUTING the resources they have symbolic control over. Inflation also works on the compound interest rule. If the people who have these vast fortunes, gained by any means, let their money rot away in a bank, it won't be very long at all before they lose their purchasing power (which IS their bargaining power). If they park this money in investments, they can either keep up with inflation, get ahead of it, or fall behind it; they stand to make even more money, or lose it all. But they have to be knowledgeable and make good decisions. They are, in essence, resource managers. And they must perform to keep their power.

I would have to argue that sanitation workers save far more lives than heart surgeons do. One of the key reason that we have less illness, and fewer plagues today is that we have lots of sanitation workers. If we had the percentage of deaths today that existed just a few hundred years ago from poor sanitation, we wouldn't need any heart surgeons because most of us would be dead long before any heart condition caused us a problem.

Also, we definately need far more sanitation workers than we do heart surgeons. Does every school really need a heart surgeon? Does every manufacturing plant need a heart surgeon? Does every large office building and every hotel need a heart surgeon?

This is a pretty good point, but it overlooks one important piece of the puzzle. A janitor can be easily replaced, whereas a heart surgeon cannot.

Further, your point about sanitation saving more lives than medicine alone discounts the fact that how you are talking about sanitation -- sewer systems, landfills, food handling techniques, medicine itself, and general public knowledge -- goes well beyond the lowly janitor. People who design sewer systems are civil engineers, and are paid quite well. It's the same thing with landfills, requiring many experts in ground water and fuels systems to maintain a functioning dump. Refrigeration has more to do with food handling than anything else. Medicine is 99% sanitation and 1% medical knowledge. And public knowledge, such as good hand washing habits, are things a society becomes imbued with over time. But if our contract service forgets to take out the trash on a Friday... nobody is going to die by Monday because of it.