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Its kind of sad how many people dont get this. Its like the first thing you learn when you study economics at any level.
@rholb depends on the group, there are many causes at play.
Black communities for example are generally suffering from recent racism that explicitly kept them poor for a long time. Even once the bulk of the racist policies were gone it takes a long time for a community to recover from that. Bad habbits of poor parents (not their fault but there all the same) continue to get passed down over time and takes time to break, not to mention that racism isnt completely out of the equation either.
In other cases where there isnt a systemic cause such as with some minority communities it is just a matter of the fact that some people are going to be better performers than other through a combination of genetic abilities but also, and more importantly, bad habits being passed down, just as people who perform well have the privilege of being raised with good habits to perpetuate that.
No because you are operating under the assumption that wealth is like a pie, with a fixed amount and if one person has more than another has less.
Thats not how wealth works. Wealth is constantly being generated and destroyed in huge portions. One person can generate more wealth for themselves without, necessarily, taking it from anyone else.
I think I unterstood the concept now. Very interesting, thanks for the explanation!
But still, wouldn't you say that it is more easy to generate wealth for some people than it is for other people?
Sticking to one of your examples, for building your luxorious house, wouldn't you need a certain starting set/skills to be able to do that? Like some kind of wealth (ex. free time, health) without which one wouldn't be able to generate more wealth? Or at least not as fast as somebody with more wealth at the start?
Like if somebody that has all his time as wealth and somebody that has a lot of money start building houses next to each other, the one with money would surely finish the house (and therefore the wealth generation) a lot faster, wouldn't they?
Maybe I still don't fully understand the theory, feel free to elaborate/correct me on that.
Absolutely yes, somepeople will have an easier time generating wealth than others.
The point of this post is not "The system is perfect there is no inequality".. the issue is "Billionaires are not inherently a bad thing and do not, in and of themselves, represent an injustice done to others"
@freemo I've read the other thread
You don't see the earth as a unique system hence wealth can be "created" but that's not the case. It's not a pie: it's a global set of resources that we share between humans and with an entire ecosystem
When NIKE execs use slave labour in china they are taking their wealth, their time and their humanity for profit. Same goes for every capitalist enterprises.
@rholb resources is really just another word for wealth.
As I said a billionair **can** take wealth but they also may not. It also isnt always the fault of the billionaire even if they do benefit from an unfair situation.
While the NIKe executives using slave labour may be a good example of immorality it isnt really an example of them stealing wealthy. The labour they use is at market value, those people would have had no work if NIKE didnt use them, so instead of them starving to death slowly they gave them some (unfair) amount of wealth to ensure they die more slowly, or maybe even just barely life. This is unfair, but since those people did not have the opportunity to use their labour to make wealth otherwise, it isnt an example of stolen wealth.
Obviously the solution there lies in China not educating their people in the first place so they werent subject to that slave labour, not with NIKE. If china had done their job NIKE would have been in a position to pay them much more as their market value would have been higher.
Its important to differentiate between doing soemthing that is immoral and whether wealth is actually being stolen or not.
first:
- capitalism is immoral my dude
- those people are literal slave. they don't lack education, their government enslaved them.
For the sake of argument let's take a minium wage worker in whatever country. According to the market their skills provides them barely what they need to eat and sleep.
They could hunt, forage build shelter, grow crop if the land around them wasn't owned to generate wealth one way or another.
The idea "capitalism is immoral" just tells me you are probably too indoctrinated by dogma to be able to discuss the subject objectively.
Whether they are slaves are not is a matter of semantics, but what made them slaves in china's policies, largely china's lack of desire to help educate them and give them marketable skills so they can support themselves. So whether they are a slave or not is secondary tot he fact that they are in the position they are in because of China's policies, not NIKE's.
While in theory a minimum wage worker could forage or grow crops , again, they are not prevented from doing so by NIKE or any other mega corperation. Again that is the government and clearly unfair policies.
Thanks for answering, I come from the same place as you, so guess my perspective :)
1/States and companies are not completely separated, they can be really close, eg: lobby
2/One cannot grow crop anywhere they like because of the concept of private property. Which is indeed secured by the state but not owned by the state.
3/ back to the last toot.
if:
1. resource = wealth,
2. resource are limited (one earth and all that)
Then:
3. wealth is limited
States and government are no more or less separate than people and the government. Sure companies can influence government through money, but in the end its the peoples voting power that makes decisions. So the responsibility for the laws and conduct of any democracy rests on its people.
The fact that people can not just grow crops anywhere is a consequence of policies and education, as well as law. The ownership of private property, for example, wouldnt be an issue if there was enough land to go around, there isnt. But there was a time in the USA where private property laws existed and land was free for the taking. Blame population growth and peoples unwillingness to keep the population in heck if you want to really find blame for why we cant all have land.
Resources do equal wealth, but resources are not limited to those on in the earth, nor are all the resources accessible to us. There is a great deal of resources still in the ground no one has access to, by mining those resources only then do they get injected into the population. So the volumn of accessible resources is constantly growing and while there is an upper bound if we limit ourselves to earth it also ignores the fact that as we approach that limit asteroid mining and other techniques will likely be underway as well.
It also is ignorant to the fact that resources are not limited to raw resources. We often consume raw resources and create new more useful resources from it, for example taking silicon and making it into chips. So you have created a greater (more wealth) resource from a resource that represented less wealth by doing so.
§1 capitalism is global, democracy isn't. You shift the blame for inequalities from state to the people, from personal responsibilities to education. I point the same constants, across all my examples
§2 we are centuries later with a different economic order, but the USA were not a virgin country with no inhabitant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
§3 To drill you need to own the land. You should look at the history of Congo to see how well the resource get re-ijected in the population
1/?
$3 mining resource is limited, you can only drill so much, you can only grow so much crop, ... Do you really believe asteroid mining will be old western gold rush? Only people with extreme wealth will be able to develop the tech and finance such endeavors, increasing again inequalities - if you like sci-fi watch The Expanse, it deals with those ideas and is a crazy good show.
2/3
@freemo
3/3
$4 The production of our computing power is extremely unethical... You create wealth by mining dangerous component in insecure facility, then assembling them in extreme working condition. Again I see inequality and unequal repartition of wealth.
@freemo
2/2
Wealth allow you and your heir to learn and grow in a stable environment, get those "good habits".
@freemo @rholb
But doesn't that mean that there is always generally speaking less money for a certain group of people if the system puts them at a disadvante from the beginning of their lives?
Of course everybody can work through that, but it's a lot easier if you get taught good habits by your parents and maybe inherit something, isn't it?