It’s also not capitalism.
Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.
In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.
I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.
Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.
It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.
Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 day ago
This actually applies to most all investments.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
ALL forms of making money from having money need to be abolished completely.
If you’re not creating/selling a product or providing a service, you’re not EARNING money. Furthermore, rich people getting richer through passive income is the #1 thing diminishing the returns from actually worthwhile endeavors.
phindex@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
So let’s say I’ve saved $100k over the course of 20 years of work. Investing in my friend’s bakery startup (making me a silent partner)… should be abolished??
Sebeck012@feddit.nl 1 day ago
I somewhat agree with you. And I 150% agree that “rent seeking behavior” doesn’t add to society.
But what if you want to sell a product you designed but can’t afford to create it or to setup a factory for it, so you want funding, so you try to get investments, maybe by selling equity in your company. Is that not valuable to society? The people that take the risk that your product may not sell?
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
That’s where small business grants from the government comes in.
Helping people thrive without being beholden to ruthless opportunists or run the risk of bankrupting private investors is EXACTLY the kind of thing tax dollars should be spent on in stead of the MIC, subsidies for the most profitable corporations in the world, and other such enriching of the already rich.
Xhead@lemmings.world 1 day ago
How did anyone do anything before currency was invented?
Your comment implies that what you describe is a requirement for a functioning society
It isn’t.
cogman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is mythical thinking. Frankly, there’s just not that many products that need inventing, particularly that need a factory. We are past the era where a revolutionary bread slicer will change society. Most of the actual advancements we are seeing come from grants into general scientific research. Not from some lone Einstein with a vision.
What actually is happening is some of these discoveries are very good and they ultimately get scooped up and patented by some corporate entity that thought the research was marketable.
Recognizing that reality, that innovation basically never comes from the founders of a company, should really lead you to understand what’s broken about the US economy.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, it turns out that a system that rewards people for simply having possession of something leads to behaviors that are harmful for society.
The problem isn’t landlords, that’s just the group that most people interact with directly. The problem is that our rules (primarily taxes) are setup to reward that behavior and to add burden to people who actually do work for their income.
If you’re a billionaire you can get your effective tax rate to single digits or zero. If you work for a living you pay way more taxes proportional to your income.
phindex@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
That’s not what renting a property is. Have you noticed when the water heater goes out in your apartment, you don’t pay for it? People who own properties that rent them out, absorb the risk of damage to the property that both the tenant will do directly, as well as regular wear and tear. This doesn’t even get into breach of contract from a tenant that simply stops paying rent, can’t be evicted, won’t leave… etc. Or one who simply moves out without telling the landlord, leaving the landlord to try to scramble and figure out how to get it back on the market so that they can cover their expenses.
When rent in an area makes renting the property more attractive than selling the property, rent in that area will go down because of an increase in availability.
MithranArkanere@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Which is why buybacks need to be illegal again, and dividends need to be regulated and taxed better baed on factors like how much the company benefits the community.
And employees need to be guaranteed a proportional cut too, ensuring that better performance and higher company earnings always means they earn more, and not that they get fired and the one who gets a bonus is some random CEO who only kept trying to push bad ideas the employees kept fighting all the time.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Getting a paycheck automatically means that someone has more money before a product, or service is delivered. So I’m gonna stretch this a little… If we like jobs that pay money then we gotta live with rich assholes. But if we want no rich assholes and truly everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount, then we need something other than capitalism. We need socialism. But how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Instead of a rich asshole, you can have worker owned cooperatives and such.
That’s just objectively not the case. Some people are able to provide more essential or better quality services and labor than others. There are also more and less enjoyable activities.
Everyone’s time can be worth the same amount for the same activity at the same quality level.
You will always have people in more powerful positions and some will take advantage of it. What you can do is rotate people with term limits and such. However that can also have downsides in effectiveness and efficiency.
You can also impose limits on how much stuff a person can own. There are ways to circumvent this with non profit NGOs and such.
Socialist economies also need taxes to pay for infrastructure and the operations of the state.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is basically where not even I believe in myself.
Cooperatives… A few billion of us get together to build a rocket…never gonna happen. A few of us build a power plant…yeah right! Never gonna happen.
What about life? My life, how much is my life worth? Is it worth more than yours or less? Divided into life/second, if I’m worth the same as you are, then I should get paid the same as you no matter what I do… I could be a painter or a seamstress or a cook or a bricklayer. I should be worth the same. Even a bum who wants nothing to do with anyone should be worth the same as the most smartest person to ever live. Its a life. You don’t get to be worth more by being smarter or making more stuff.
I would definitely not want to live in a society where my kids will be homeless even though I am the hardest working worker. If my kids are lazy I still want to ensure they live better than I did. So although I don’t like this consumerism centric capitalistic society, that socialistic society sucks.
I much rather be in a society where you can own things and give them to your kids, and have those things hold some value. I don’t want the government limiting what I can and cannot do. To some extent I think this sort of capitalism is possible, but the billionaires have got to go puff. I would love living a grand life with a big house in a sunny part of California. That’s impossible now no matter what I say or do. Meanwhile some billionaire could just buy California if he wanted to. That sort of money accumulation I’m totally against.