michas
People created money as a way of remembering favours they did to each other. So basically your income reflects your worth for society (how much society values things you can produce). That worked pretty well as long as money were somenthing physical and rare, as gold. Once money became "state made", as you called it, government won an opportunity to manipulate them. And that manipulation, creating money without creating actual goods that you can buy in exchange for them, is in fact the reason for the crisis. Banks created derivates from risky mortgages, do some mathematic voo-doo to convince everyone that they are safe and profitable.
>Did you miss the part where I mention land
No, but what's the point of keeping the land unused? it's much more profitable for a billionaire to build some houses, apartments, offices there and then rent them. And by renting apartments to poor people you're making them a favour, because they have not enough money to build their own place to stay.
>You don't have a clue what you're talking about. This is the case for billionaires that you see on HN because that's what we're interested in. There are plenty of billionaires who don't work and don't have businesses. "Old money" families.
How much money can you spend on your own needs? House (or houses)? $200M? private jet? another $100M Collection of sport cars (Ferrari, Bugatti, etc.)? Let's give it $30M Travel around the world? that's hardly $10$ So you see that spending BILLIONS of dollars just for your own good is not an easy thing. That's why sooner or later every billionare engages in a some big project which is supposed to be his legacy for the mankind.
Your problem is that you see people that earn more than you as inherently evil and want to punish them.
That's a nonsense. Money itself are not a goods, because they are worthless: you can eat those banknotes you have in your wallet or do anything usefull with them. They only serve as a symbol that allows more convenient trade of real goods. And I'm not gonna create any "widgets" to replace them, but still many people uses alternative to state made money, like Bitcoin. Thinking about money the way you think is a main reason of the current economical crysis.
>No they can't because you've bought up all the land and allocated all the resources despite using a small fraction of them.
Billionaires usually don't spend much on consumption, neither they keep their resources unused. Most of every billionaire wealth is his company, or companies, in which they employ thousands of people (giving them opportunity to earn for their living) and produce things that fulfill needs of millions. That's all they owe to the rest of society.
I stated from the beginning that I consider ruling out any possibility of stealing and cheating to be prerequisite for existence of the capitalism. Given that,the only remaining ways to become rich are to be competent and intelligent.
> Also, keep in mind those "idiots" will have to obey their "smart, successful" rulers without right to question their rule. They are also in much larger number and may resent that. How do you intend to oppress them?
Funny thing is that they do not need to be oppressed at all. Most people are just mentally incapable of questioning rules that were imposed on them, they are totally happy with explanations like "it has always been like that. It has to be like that". They even like being told what to do because it is easier and gives them sense of security.
And those few who are brave enough to question rules are welcomed to be successful, earn a lot of money and join the class of "rulers".
Moreover, provided that the "rulers" are really intelligent they will know how much they can push their minions without causing resentment. This is basically how US politics works these days :)
If police, streets and so on were funded from taxes, then yes, they paid much more. If they were built by private companies - the same is true.
>Did they pay their parents for raising them into privilege?
That's that pure luck, agreed. But you can't punish people for being lucky. You just have wrong understanding of the concept of people being equal. We can be considered equal in our basic rights, but we'll never be equal in talent, IQ, motivation, and so on. So if two people start doing the same thing they can have equal chances at the beginning, but will never achieve exactly the same results. One person will always be more successful than other, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It is like sprinters race on the Olympic games: you have to ensure that all competitors will start running at the same time, but forcing them to also cross the finish line at the same time is just ridiculous. And that's what you postulate.
> Chile was as close to laissez faire as has ever been tried on that scale. Where did their mass unemployment come from?
Stupid monetary policy (fixed exchange rate between dollar and peso), which was against liberalism philosophy that Friedman tried to impose. However Chile basically continues this liberal economical politics and their unemployment rate is currently 6.1%
>>In capitalism there's always more work to do that workforce available. >Ideological dreaming. Nothing more.
That's not a dreaming, just a mere fact: people's needs are unlimited, we always want new cars, computers, clothes, exotic holiday journeys, etc. otherwise economical growth would have stopped once we had learned how to provide basic food and shelter for everyone (which was in late Middle Ages, i think)
>Anyway, even if that's true, how about you mind your own goddamn business and stop worrying about what other people choose to do with their lives?
That is just ridiculous statement when coming from your mouth: it is my goddamn business when someone tries to rob me from my money in a name of your weird understanding of "fairnes" Poor people can do what they want with their lives as long as they stay away from me.
I also never told I don't want to pay the police, in fact it is one of three things that are worth paying taxes for: police and courts to provide internal safety and justice, and army to protect from external enemies (other countries, terrorists etc.)
Also, unemployment is an artificial problem that only exists in fundamentally sick, socialist economies. In capitalism there's always more work to do that workforce available. You can only break this by introducing high employment costs. If you tax work at the same level as luxury goods (and all taxes average worker has to pay add up to about 50% of his gross income) then work itself becomes "luxury". And if you pay people for doing nothing large part of them will have no motivation to find any meaningful job.
http://www.heritage.org/index/ will be helpfull
> This way you reintroduce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrage#Census_suffrage.
Yes, and that's the point, because it immediately cures main deficency of the democracy: decisions about country's major issuess would be made by people who are smart, successfull and have experience leading big organizations or companies, instead of being made by every idiot that happens to be of the legal age.
Capitalist markets are good because they allow people to have a vote in everything that concerns them. But instead of putting their vote in a ballot box they vote with their money, which has much more power.
Redistribution is just a way of punishing smart and hardworking people for their success and reward the rest of society for their laziness. This would surely end in a disaster: people loose motivation to do anything, because they cannot see any correlation between their effort and income. This is also known as "learned helplessness" and will occur in most of middle class people.
Also, nothing depraves people more that money got without effort.
Benjamin Franklin