Most billionaires aren’t billionaires in cash. If the market crashes, so do they. Now they might be reduced to “only” a hundred million or so but that can be catastrophic when your personal finances depend on billions in stock backing up a series of long term rotating loans.
They wanted to use the market to exploit the people. But that makes them vulnerable in a way rich people didn’t used to be vulnerable.
Eh, when food gets scarce there’s a few ways things can go. Usually the people in charge try to stop those kind of extreme events by handing out food. It’s when there’s a dust bowl at the same time that things get nasty.
That’s uhh not how real life works. It ain’t a story where morality (yours or mine) matters. Hungry humans get very desperate and has been the cause of more than one period of extreme violence. That’s why people get fed when governments can do it. Not because of any sense of charity.
The government is more real than the economy. It’s made of actual people doing actual things. In a total economic collapse but with a good food supply government ration stamps become the new form of pay. Again. This has happened before. They can’t wave a magic wand but they can physically work together in their pre-existing hierarchy.
A good food supply means a working economy, for gods sake!
You need seeds, water for irrigation, fertilizers, tractors, various attachments to them, trucks, fuel, silos, for storin, dedicated plants and educated people to build and maintain everything. And I haven’t reached animal husbandry or food processing!
Or you would argue that we all do subsistence agriculture because then I have a very bad news for you. Where to many for ineficient low yield agriculture and even if this wasn’t a problem,many, like you, don’t know how to do it.
Well no because subsistence farming is the exact opposite of government distribution.
You are aware that none of that stuff magically disappears right? It might disappear from an accounts book but it still physically exists. I really don’t know how else to put this to you but the labor, equipment, and human experience don’t just poof when the economy crashes. It’s all still there waiting to be used. If it wasn’t then we’d have died out a long time ago. The economy is an ephemeral concept thought up by humans. The stock market doesn’t make the grain grow.
Well kid, it’s funny that your ideea it’s not applicable only if it’s sapping resources created beforehand. So is a net consumer not producer. In comunist terms it’s a “parasite on the workers class”.
There are some key concepts you’re not grasping and you should educate yourself for your own good. Things like:
economy is much more than a stock market.
producing good and services that people require is the economy itself.
politics doesn’t create anything (regardless of the ideology) it suppose to find the best way to manage what has been created by the economy and society.
the reliability of a system is inversely proportional with its complexity. In other words things break more complex things have bigger chances to break.
I didn’t say politics. I said government. The people doing this kind of work will do it no matter which party is in office. And they are out there right now somewhere in the world doing it already. And if you want to cast the whole of production and distribution as “the economy” then it would take an asteroid, super volcano, or zombie plague to stop it. We aren’t talking about everyone just doing nothing and you know it. People are still going to harvest food. Truck drivers are still going to drive their trucks. The method of pay just changes.
Saying the economy isn’t just the stock market when the economy crashing is solely defined by the stock market going down is fucking hilarious.
“Work for each other and against wealthy investors” would result in a smaller economy, but the focus is on the positive thing built, instead of just sabotage.
“Smaller” if you’re a billionaire. When they say “the economy” just insert “rich people’s wealth”. It wouldn’t be a smaller economy in reality, because what drives a healthy economy is people spending money. Rich people don’t spend money, regular people do. Regular people getting paid more and having a larger piece of the pie, counterintuitively means there’s more pie.
Only to the extent that withheld labor during a strike affects it. Once the strike(s) are over, an economy that puts more spending money in more pockets will be a bigger one
It turns out that the size of the economy is related to how well-distributed the wealth in it is. If most of the money goes into wealthy pockets and everybody else lives in a sort of poverty-imposed austerity, that depresses a lot of that economy’s potential.
What the UAW are after is not a smaller economy, but a more-robust (likely larger) one that includes more people in it.
I think the problems (of high inequality, of unsustainable resource use) are distinct, but related and can probably be gone after by targeting the same things: price gouging and suppressing wages.
If capital can’t do those things, labor will have the choice to work less if it doesn’t need the money to survive. We’ve long-since passed the point Keynes predicted (at which, productivity would be high enough to support people at a high standard of living without them working full time) in terms of production, the obstacle to that happening is that capital gets to allocate those surpluses and it keeps most of them
I’ve spent my career in the tech industry, specifically around open source software.
Corporate powers helped fund the work of individuals for their own purposes, but I can ways we can use them to rebuild local economies instead.
We just need to change how we’re using the tools. This can be done by existing skilled workers who are willing to make new choices around who to work for, or by motivated new engineers who have access to the free tools and free training material.
Controversial: how can illegal immigrants send money home but regular workers live paycheck to paycheck?
Rent would be cheaper if renters would unionize and wouldn’t spend above an agreed on limit.
It’s so hard to coordinate that only some workers can ask billionaires for better deals. Why? Why is not everybody ashamed that they cannot coordinate with their neighbors?
Roman’s walked out of town once a year to remind the elite of their value. The west models itself after the Roman Republic but tries to skip on the hard parts.
Can confirm. I once had an apartment in NC. I was the only white guy in the complex. Everyone else was Latino. I had a one bedroom apartment. I was the ONLY single occupant in my building. The apartment below me was occupied by a guy, his wife, his infant child, his mother and at least one cousin. They were still the most gracious people I’d ever lived amongst. When his daughter was born they had a bigass cookout and invited everyone in our complex. That was the day that I learned I was the only white guy, and it was an amazing experience. I ended up letting some of the guys crash in my apartment while I was on the road, and I always came back to a clean house and a fridge full of leftovers.
Unfortunately I had to move back to OH after a year, but I’d go back to NC in a heartbeat if the situation allowed.
Given the shit-sandwich choice between OH and NC, I’d choose NC as well. It’s almost civilized, if you can ignore the lock on the state legislature that the GOP has, fire ants, Aedes Egypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitos that don’t give a fuck the sun is up, Lone Star ticks that make you allergic to consuming mammal, and an oppressively hot summer. Though I’d rather live in the mid-Atlantic or West Coast where the GOP hasn’t gained as much traction.
The west models itself after the Roman Republic but tries to skip on the hard parts.
I don’t know about “the West” – literally most any western developed country besides the US understands what the “Bread” part of Bread & Circuses means. Labor laws, universal healthcare, paid vacation, paid parental leave, election laws designed to encourage voting and discourage election manipulation – all of these things are, in some form or another, part of nearly every western developed country besides the USA.
how can illegal immigrants send money home but regular workers live paycheck to paycheck?
Migrants are not sending money to strangers in their home countries. They are supporting families, just the same as those who are not migrants and live with their families.
In many cases someone will settle for a very low standard of living, and set aside a small amount to support family living in a country with a much lower cost of living.
Now, what is a low standard of living? We know that the world doesn’t have the resources to let everybody live like an average American. Sooner or later, resource usage has to be reduced. Everybody will have a very low standard of living unless we figure out how to live comfortably with less.
In objective terms the lifestyle framed as the American ideal is unsustainable and inequitable, but much of the material value of the lifestyle carries little value in relative terms for genuine well being. Planning the built environment, cooperating in the community and workplace, and sharing benefits and burdens across our lives, would allow us to achieve a very high standard of living for everyone at a much more reasonable material cost.
I am not understanding the general theme of your various comments in relation to one another.
To put it bluntly: if they shape society, is that no contribution?
With some struggling, workers could invest part of their wages but they live paycheck to paycheck, of course often also not entirely by their own choice.
Instead of asking everybody to save, money is pooled in billionaires who don’t struggle when they invest.
That creates an unfair power imbalance but workers could change everything with taxes if they suffered too much.
Billionaires shape society in their own interests, for unbounded accumulation of private wealth, generated from the labor of others, despite their not contributing any labor of their own, nor making any other contribution.
Right, the economy isn’t something that supports the life of all humans. Billionaires have yachts so it must only be working for them. And since only billionaires benefit from the economy, we can wreck it no problem. There won’t be deaths from starvation and exposure, because food and housing aren’t part of the economy we’re going to wreck.
I am sorry you missed the theme. Please let me help.
The objective is to build an economy that supports everyone being well fed and well housed, instead of the very few hoarding rockets, jets, yachts, and multiple homes, while many more remain unfed and unhoused.
Central banks can be good, ours is not. It bails the financial class out time and time again and hikes up rates to ensure interest earners are unaffected by inflation at the cost of workers.
Only problem with this is that this doesn’t even hurt the ultra rich - every catastrophe is just a new investment opportunity for them. E.g. after Brexit they just moved their money and businesses out of the UK, leaving the poor schlebs who live there to deal with it.
If conditions are unlivable for too many people, that’s bad and it calls for a re-negotiation of everything. It also bears reminding today’s leisure class/ultra-wealthy that part of the basis for their existence as such was always a trade-off between them paying their workers enough to live with dignity and the metaphorical torches and pitchforks and guillotines staying in mothballs
A small amount is good. Deflation makes it so not spending money is more beneficial. The longer you wait to spend the more the money is worth. This causes fewer products and services to be purchased, which pays for wages. Inflation makes the opposite true. The longer you wait to spend your money the less it’s worth. It encourages spending, not saving. Inflation that outstrips increases to pay is obviously very bad though.
Currency isn’t worth a shit cause it ain’t money. Money should be out of all stable saving of value. Gold is money, precious metals are money, diamonds are money. Currencies are worthless shit created to infinity by banks and hold together by enforcement of governments which are deep in debt to those bank so cannot do a fucking shit about that. All of our tax money goes straight to banks.
Having worked at a bank for a year I can certainly say, banks need the federal government just as much as the federal government needs the banks. The federal government (as well as state governments) frequently use banks as a low cost, low risk way to increase access to capital for those that need it, as well as of course controlling interest rates to then control the speed that the economy grows or shrinks
A well-regulated private banking industry allows the competing interests of a government and a private company to compliment eachother in ways that really only become apparent from directly working in the industry. The government provides grants and subsidies to allow small banks to provide access to capital that might not otherwise exist, competition with other banks forces banks to provide better services to customers and government regulations prevent banks from taking too much risk or doing too much harm, plus a strong government safetynet protecting bank customers from failure all come together to provide a surprisingly good system. I’m not saying private banks are perfect nor that its the best system one could dream up, but in a society that relies on capitalism as a method to limit access to resources, a well regulated private banking industry with strong competition (which we actually largely have!) is really good for consumers
Remember that shareholder primacy assures the banks will pressure the government to deregulate, eventually capturing regulatory departments, as has happened in the US (if not the whole developed world).
Marx explains this in Das Kapital even when there was a notion of social responsibility. But after Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919, it was established by judicial ruling that publicly owned companies have interests in direct opposition to the public, and should not be allowed to influence government, which is meant to serve the interests of the public (and only the public).
Even in 1919, plutocrats had already been dismantling US democracy towards oligarchy. It had failed just as the Soviet Union was trying its hand at ur-communism (and being sabotaged by Wilson).
Gold is not money. Gold is something that some people value but has no value in itself. It’s useful in small quantities for electronics, but other than that it just looks pretty. It has almost no utility. If an apocalypse happens and society fails, gold won’t be worth anything. If people need food, water, shelter to survive, they won’t accept your gold for payment. They can’t eat that. Booze may be a good item that will retain value well, but gold will not.
Precious metals are commodities, money is used to exchange commodities. Using a commodity as money is obsolete. I get that youre mad at the feds but that’s a systemic problem, not moneys fault. Its like getting mad at biotech for the practices of Bayer.
These commodities are not inherently valuable, the labour required to extract them is what gives them valuable.
Yeah of course, you can always trick people into believing something has value when it doesn’t. But as long as you know where value comes from, no one can trick you into buying a Pokemon card.
Currency is a very useful tool to gauge the worth of dissimilar items used for trading. It’s a trait known as fungibility. Without it, we’re in full barter mode. The barter system is… deeply flawed for one reason. If you don’t have anything the seller wants, you’re SOL. You wanna buy food, but don’t have gold, silver, or a skill that the food vendor needs? Well, you’re going to be hungry. Abstracting value to a useless piece of paper that denotes a value, and is enforced by the power of the land (a government) means that paper can buy food, shelter, comforts, whatever you need. It’s an objectively better system.
Just luxury spending and underperforming investments. Essential spending can’t be deferred, and worthwhile investments will outpace any natural rate of deflation. Forced inflation drives conspicuous consumption and malinvestment, but in doing so it increases monetary velocity, which helps bankers and tax collectors extract higher rent from the economy.
This is something you can think about from a micro economic level! think of your next big dollar purchase. Maybe its a car, or a TV or a computer or a kayak. Whatever it is, you probably have to save up to buy it, you probably spend a lot of time researching and thinking about which one to buy, and you wait for a good time to buy. If you know that simply waiting another few months means you can get it for cheaper, would you? If the answer is yes, then that’s how deflation would effect every luxury and other non-necessity purchase
Note that a critical part of that equation is that wages are included in the inflationary trend.
But other than that explicit detail, that’s spot on. Ultimately money is a “trick” we use to influence our productive behavior. So a slightly creeping number works best to make the “money” move instead of sit still, and the whole point of the mathematical model is that the things need to move around.
This is just plain wrong. The majority of people don’t get to “decide” to spend/save, they live paycheck to paycheck. The people that can make that decision are actually incentivized to NOT spend but to “invest” (aka loan) because interest rates are higher, and thus get better returns.
Inflation is really a wealth transfer from the poorest to the wealthy since wages don’t keep up with inflation.
Now you can figure out why deflation is considered a bad thing by mainstream media.
Most of the time most wages do keep up with inflation. Minimum wage should in a reasonable country as well. Also, most people can totally defer spending some money. Not for food and rent and other necessities, but for other things, like getting your car fixed or things like that that can be pushed off for later.
True, yeah. Rent inflation is making things real bad. The past little while almost no wages have kept up with regular inflation even. Generally though, most wages have kept up with both, but recently in particular things have gotten fucked.
With all of the credit balances being carried, I question the whole “people will just wait instead of spending because it will be more financially advantageous”. I’m also not so sure we really need an economic system that encourages and depends on increased consumption. It would be nice if we had a system that could handle inflation, stagnation, and deflation without imploding on itself.
To me, the biggest factor is that it means debt burdens get lighter over time, assuming you are at least covering interest (if not then interest will outpace inflation, though even the growing debt will be cheaper over time vs what it would be without inflation). Oh, also assuming wages match inflation, which is the other big factor. Your employer can save money over time just by being stingy with raises.
Learn your history dumb fuck. You don’t have to believe me. You still haven’t answered what’s to gain by pissing tax payers money away to a failed eastern bloc state that formerly peddled weapons to our enemies.
The price of food is increasing at around double the rate that everything else is. This indicates food prices are the driver of inflation.
What could be the cause of this? Is there any disruptions in the food supply somewhere in the world? Like for example a staple food like grain? What’s causing this disruption?
Inflation makes debt worth less. Generally the working class buys homes and cars by borrowing money.
Of course banks will charge more interest to compensate for this so a high amount of inflation isn’t good. Deflation is bad because the banks are going to continue charging interest even while the value of the debt principle is increasing.
So ideally you want a small amount of inflation so there’s some wiggle room before dipping into deflation territory.
There’s too much inflation so central banks have to raise interest rates which makes people less likely to borrow money which shrinks the money supply. This is how inflation is controlled, but also not a good situation as it can lead to a recession. So it’s a delicate balancing act.
Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. Nothing is intrinsically “good” there’s a cost to everything. And no socialism isn’t some cheat code that allows people to escape the dismal realities of economics. Best you can ever do is balance things well enough that everyone can have a decent life.
Inflation reduces the value of money at the bank: the money saved as well as the money borrowed.
In an ideal world, wages are indexed on inflation (way of calculating inflation in this context can be discussed), and inflation is kept above present targets levels (central banks try to keep it at 2% these days).
That makes your debts easier to reimburse, and limits returns on savings. Have you ever noticed that people who keep talking about the “value of work” actually push for low wages and no or low taxes on capital gains, so actually wants the capital to make more money than work?
A low inflation allows big money to hoard more and more. Higher inflation means money that’s not actively contributing to the economy will lose its value over time, and that’s exactly what you, at the bottom of the ladder, want (and considering top of the ladder is hundreds of billions of $, ever 6 figures employees are bottom of the ladder).
Too high inflation leads to an uncontrolled spiral. Deflation is also very bad (no investment will ever happen if your money just appreciate by doing nothing). But the 2% target is not to protect you. It’s made for money to make more money.
But about the link between wages and inflation: what we have today is a situation where we let cost of life dramatically outpace wage growth. So where did the inflation come from? Profits! That needs to be rebalanced.
From 1945 to the early 80’s (before the €), France and some other countries minmum wages were indexed on inflation. If doing so would instantly crash an economy, we would have noticed…
