Re:The real use of money is to buy freedom
by flyinglizard on Tuesday December 24, 2013 @10:24AM
(#6959674)
Among Forbes top 20 billionaires, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who's made his fortune from natural resources.
A person who seeks value from society - value originating at the work of others - has to provide such value back. If all you can do is simple manual labor, you will need to provide quite a lot of it to purchase scarce items that have a high degree of inherent value (such as an iPhone).
Let's reframe. Our economic system is capitalism. That means I can exclusively control (via state force) a region's natural resources (a "property" relation between me and everyone else in the universe). It also means that most people try to rent themselves out, giving themselves up to someone's command for half their waking lives, in what is called wage slavery.
The more bargaining power the wealthy elites have, the less they have to pay their subordinates, and can impose worse working conditions. Another phenomenon is you can have a city with as many empty houses as homeless people... when property relations are extended to the virtual, unauthorized sharing/using ideas and computer bits are criminalized.