Comment on Fucking leeches

• Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • Sebeck012@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?

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    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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?

      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.

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    • Xhead@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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      • crimsonpoodle@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Before currency was invented might be a stretch— back then, which was a long long long, time ago we likely didn’t even have professions in the same sense. Albeit Dave might have had a knack for fishing, Kendra for making canoes etc.

        There was plenty of space in the wilderness you could just go live for free. Now we have a lot of people, we need agriculture to support that population; there isn’t enough land for hunter gatherer societies to exist without a large population collapse first.

        Now to your point I suppose we could have a society without money; yet I think there is some freedom in currency even if everyone gets a UBI. It allows two random strangers to come together and have one person buy something without having to trade an item that the other person wants, then the seller can go buy something they want.

        Without currency we would have to have a somewhat complex trading system, which inevitably would see certain items of rarity never traded, or traded for so much surplus goods that a new ironically materialistic moneyed class would develop. It would make for an interesting book, but I think so long as people have varied interests and desires, and create creative works, money is a useful thing.

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    • cogman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • phindex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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??

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• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • phindex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

    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.

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• werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • Samskara@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Instead of a rich asshole, you can have worker owned cooperatives and such.

    everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount

    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.

    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.

    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.

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    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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• MithranArkanere@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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