Euhhh... no, unless you take a tautologic approach, certainly not.
Well, yes, we are talking about the definition about "contribution to society". The only definition that makes sense to me is that the value to society is the aggregate of the value to individuals. And individuals express the value of something based on how much they are willing to pay for it relative to other things.
There have been many other definitions of "value to society", for example by Marxists and fascists, but they simply are not consistent.
Raising the minimum wage hasn't created any of that gloom and doom you claim anywhere in the U.S. now or in the past.
I didn't claim "gloom and doom", I simply claimed that companies don't hire people for more than they are worth. Historically, minimum wages have remained low enough that they have hurt only a small number of people.
And there are better approaches to breaking the coercion than simply mandating rent from private renters.
I have no idea what that is even supposed to mean. If you mean that we should end criminalizing homelessness, I'm all for that. We should also end zoning laws, rent control, and size restrictions on housing, all of which increase the cost of housing.
The featured article is about this becoming less and less the case over time.
The featured article has nothing to do with that. And no matter what you think about the development of the details of wealth distribution, wealth remains widely distributed in our society and turns over rapidly.
(Much of the supposed wealth and income stagnation/inequality is actually due to transferring private savings into government programs; for example, everybody who pays into social security effectively has an additional net worth of about half a million dollars at retirement.)
A person isn't coerced into renting from a specific landlord but is coerced into finding some landlord in the first place.
Correct. And I agree that slavery and excessive rents are analogous to some degree.
What I am reminding people of is that neither slavery nor excessive rents are the result of unfettered free markets; slavery and excessive rents are both the result of government coercion.
Free markets distribute capital to a person based on a person's value to one or more suppliers of capital.
Indeed that is often true, and the "value to suppliers of capital" is based on the value to society. In fact, people with a lot of money to invest have money because they are good at spotting what people want.
If they think people want anti-cancer drugs, that's where they invest money. If they think people want pet rocks, then that's where they invest money. If they make the right call, they get more money to invest. If not, they cease being "suppliers of capital".
I live in the real world, where bookkeeping about voluntary economic transactions in the form of dollars keeps track of what people desire and are willing to work for.
Seriously, how do you think the value of a good or service should be defined?
No, the "sophistry" is to pretend that landlords are "coercing" renters when.
That is something a lot of the crazy end of the free market, no minimum wage crowd routinely fail to understand, that constructive coercion is not freedom any more than coercion at gunpoint is.
What people like you advocating progressive or socialist policies fail to understand is that you can't compel people to do things that are against their interest: if you try to raise the minimum wage higher than what people are worth, they just don't get hired; if you try to force landlords to keep rents below market rates, they won't rent out at all. You don't like unemployment and housing shortages? The policies you advocate are creating them.
How exactly did those cops being paid directly by the property-owners make that scenario any better than it would have been for Alice if they had been paid by taxes instead?
The issue isn't whether "the scenario" gets any better; obviously, a situation in which a few property owners split up the entire country has numerous problems. Among other things, property owners in that situation would likely resort to coercion, destroying the free market, and render discussions about free markets moot.
The issue is whether this is a stable economic equilibrium in a free market without coercive force, and it clearly isn't: the more concentrated private property becomes, the more valuable and hence costly the protection of property rights becomes. That means that the concentration of property is self-limiting, and a free market with private enforcement of property rights will never produce the situation in your example.
work extra hard to service that "privilege" which only exists due to a preexisting inequality... And things like progressive tax structures and estate taxes are bandages over the problem of capitalism being rigged for people who already have capital.
Your premise is wrong: capitalism is not "rigged" for people who already have capital. If you're born rich, chances are you'll die a lot less well off than you were born.
Rent and interest distribute capital according to who already has capital, not according to their contributions to society.
You only get rent and interest if you forego consumption and invest your money in things that produce value to society. If you consume instead of investing, or if you invest in things that don't produce value, you get nothing.
Imagine a toy market consisting of only two people, who both do the same work and make the same money from that work. One of them has more capital than he's using, and the other doesn't have enough capital to use. The latter then has to borrow capital from the former, and pay the former for the privilege.
Sorry, but that example makes no sense whatsoever. The value of money is determined by what people are willing to trade for it. In this case, person two would simply say "you have a lot of nice pieces of paper there, but I don't recognize them as having any value".
The problem in my hypothetical scenario doesn't go away if the property-owners all have their own privately-funded police forces instead. If anything, it gets worse.
Some people would say that the problem in that scenario is the legal enforcement of private property ownership at all. I wouldn't go that far.
In our current society, the enforcement of property rights involves several aspects of coercion, like forcing people to pay taxes in order to finance public police forces and public courts. That's not really a problem in practice because private property is widely distributed throughout society. It does become a problem when you construct hypothetical scenarios like the ones you did. But the source of the problem is the government coercion underlying how we currently organize police and courts, not free markets or private property per se.
And I'd argue that a capitalist market with rent and interest in it is just one step removed from serfdom.
Well, and you are wrong. If you want to know why you're wrong, read Hayek.
That's not a truly free market.
A free market is a market where transactions are voluntary, nothing more and nothing less.
Only when the serfs live on and work their own lands (or at least work each others' lands in even proportions, dividing the different types of labor up but keeping the capital well-distributed) will they stop being serfs and become true freemen.
Free markets distribute capital according to how much people actually contribute to society. If you don't contribute to society, you are going to live in abject poverty and are going to depend on the charity of others in order not to starve. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
In cities that have criminalized homelessness, failure to own or rent an enclosed place in which to live lands a person in prison. How is threat of imprisonment not "intimidation or threats or some other form of pressure or force"? Or if you disagree with the definition, how do you prefer to define coercion?
Shadow of Eternity made an analogy between charging rents the market will bear and slavery, implying that landlords coerce tenants to pay unreasonable amounts of rent. His analogy is wrong: the transaction between landlord and tenant is voluntary, there is no coercion involved.
You're making the argument that criminalizing homelessness involves "coercion", which is something different.
That condition is called "serfdom", and, indeed, it is pretty much the same as slavery. The coercion there is government coercion: "the only place that anyone can legally live or work".
That is not the yet world we live in, although there is certainly a risk that we fall into it; read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom".
In those cities that have criminalized homelessness, such as through sit/lie laws, renting an apartment is also "an economic transaction coerced by government under threat of force."
No, the transaction itself is not coerced, no matter how essential it may be to your survival.
How far do you have to go to afford rent before it becomes 'involuntary'?
I have no idea what you mean. Nature compels you to find shelter (and food and water), but the transactions that you engage in to obtain them are still voluntary.
I'm not even sure it's a good idea. Packing the poor into high density housing doesn't have the greatest track record
A 291 sq ft condo in San Francisco for $415000 is not "high density housing for the poor". Granted, San Francisco is an ugly dump, but not because of condos selling for $1400/sq ft.
"Packing the poor" into anything, i.e., subsidized and public housing, has a lousy track record. High density housing has an excellent track record.
Yep, subsidy or not, nobody wants a shanty town in their backyard.
Oh, let's call it what it is: greedy existing home owners corrupt government officials so that they pass zoning laws and regulations in order to keep housing prices high. And to add insult to injury, they usually pretend they are doing it out of altruism and "concern for the poor".
We only need to "subsidize the supply side" by getting out of the way. Building in major metropolitan areas has become such a complex and expensive process that planning, zoning, and code often accounts for at least as much of a building as the land and the building itself.
If they want to actually help the poor then maybe small units like 300 sqft is what we ought to subsidize.
Small units don't need to be subsidized, they simply need to be permitted. Places like San Francisco have minimum size restrictions for apartments and condos, and they are in large part responsible for the astronomical housing prices.
Rents in SF are high not because of anything developers are doing but because it's a desirable place to live for many people, and many people are willing and able to pay high rents. It's desirable, not just because of its location and natural beauty, but because its infrastructure is highly subsidized by government.
If it's too expensive for you, don't live there; it's a simple as that.
"European Bigotry"? Can you even say that with a straight face?
I can easily say that with a straight face. Europeans have a long history of cultural chauvinism, bigotry, and ignorance about the rest of the world, and in particular about the US.
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Well, yes, we are talking about the definition about "contribution to society". The only definition that makes sense to me is that the value to society is the aggregate of the value to individuals. And individuals express the value of something based on how much they are willing to pay for it relative to other things.
There have been many other definitions of "value to society", for example by Marxists and fascists, but they simply are not consistent.
I didn't claim "gloom and doom", I simply claimed that companies don't hire people for more than they are worth. Historically, minimum wages have remained low enough that they have hurt only a small number of people.
I have no idea what that is even supposed to mean. If you mean that we should end criminalizing homelessness, I'm all for that. We should also end zoning laws, rent control, and size restrictions on housing, all of which increase the cost of housing.
The featured article has nothing to do with that. And no matter what you think about the development of the details of wealth distribution, wealth remains widely distributed in our society and turns over rapidly.
(Much of the supposed wealth and income stagnation/inequality is actually due to transferring private savings into government programs; for example, everybody who pays into social security effectively has an additional net worth of about half a million dollars at retirement.)
Correct. And I agree that slavery and excessive rents are analogous to some degree.
What I am reminding people of is that neither slavery nor excessive rents are the result of unfettered free markets; slavery and excessive rents are both the result of government coercion.
Indeed that is often true, and the "value to suppliers of capital" is based on the value to society. In fact, people with a lot of money to invest have money because they are good at spotting what people want.
If they think people want anti-cancer drugs, that's where they invest money. If they think people want pet rocks, then that's where they invest money. If they make the right call, they get more money to invest. If not, they cease being "suppliers of capital".
I live in the real world, where bookkeeping about voluntary economic transactions in the form of dollars keeps track of what people desire and are willing to work for.
Seriously, how do you think the value of a good or service should be defined?
No, the "sophistry" is to pretend that landlords are "coercing" renters when.
What people like you advocating progressive or socialist policies fail to understand is that you can't compel people to do things that are against their interest: if you try to raise the minimum wage higher than what people are worth, they just don't get hired; if you try to force landlords to keep rents below market rates, they won't rent out at all. You don't like unemployment and housing shortages? The policies you advocate are creating them.
The issue isn't whether "the scenario" gets any better; obviously, a situation in which a few property owners split up the entire country has numerous problems. Among other things, property owners in that situation would likely resort to coercion, destroying the free market, and render discussions about free markets moot.
The issue is whether this is a stable economic equilibrium in a free market without coercive force, and it clearly isn't: the more concentrated private property becomes, the more valuable and hence costly the protection of property rights becomes. That means that the concentration of property is self-limiting, and a free market with private enforcement of property rights will never produce the situation in your example.
Your premise is wrong: capitalism is not "rigged" for people who already have capital. If you're born rich, chances are you'll die a lot less well off than you were born.
Here is a longer discussion: http://www.economist.com/news/...
Lottery winners are another example that wealth is not self-perpetuating: few of them do well financially in the long run.
You only get rent and interest if you forego consumption and invest your money in things that produce value to society. If you consume instead of investing, or if you invest in things that don't produce value, you get nothing.
Sorry, but that example makes no sense whatsoever. The value of money is determined by what people are willing to trade for it. In this case, person two would simply say "you have a lot of nice pieces of paper there, but I don't recognize them as having any value".
Of course it goes away. Think it through.
In our current society, the enforcement of property rights involves several aspects of coercion, like forcing people to pay taxes in order to finance public police forces and public courts. That's not really a problem in practice because private property is widely distributed throughout society. It does become a problem when you construct hypothetical scenarios like the ones you did. But the source of the problem is the government coercion underlying how we currently organize police and courts, not free markets or private property per se.
Well, and you are wrong. If you want to know why you're wrong, read Hayek.
A free market is a market where transactions are voluntary, nothing more and nothing less.
Free markets distribute capital according to how much people actually contribute to society. If you don't contribute to society, you are going to live in abject poverty and are going to depend on the charity of others in order not to starve. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Eating, shitting, and breathing aren't "voluntary". That doesn't mean anybody is coercing you to do those things.
Shadow of Eternity made an analogy between charging rents the market will bear and slavery, implying that landlords coerce tenants to pay unreasonable amounts of rent. His analogy is wrong: the transaction between landlord and tenant is voluntary, there is no coercion involved.
You're making the argument that criminalizing homelessness involves "coercion", which is something different.
That condition is called "serfdom", and, indeed, it is pretty much the same as slavery. The coercion there is government coercion: "the only place that anyone can legally live or work".
That is not the yet world we live in, although there is certainly a risk that we fall into it; read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom".
No, the transaction itself is not coerced, no matter how essential it may be to your survival.
I have no idea what you mean. Nature compels you to find shelter (and food and water), but the transactions that you engage in to obtain them are still voluntary.
A 291 sq ft condo in San Francisco for $415000 is not "high density housing for the poor". Granted, San Francisco is an ugly dump, but not because of condos selling for $1400/sq ft.
"Packing the poor" into anything, i.e., subsidized and public housing, has a lousy track record. High density housing has an excellent track record.
Oh, let's call it what it is: greedy existing home owners corrupt government officials so that they pass zoning laws and regulations in order to keep housing prices high. And to add insult to injury, they usually pretend they are doing it out of altruism and "concern for the poor".
We only need to "subsidize the supply side" by getting out of the way. Building in major metropolitan areas has become such a complex and expensive process that planning, zoning, and code often accounts for at least as much of a building as the land and the building itself.
Small units don't need to be subsidized, they simply need to be permitted. Places like San Francisco have minimum size restrictions for apartments and condos, and they are in large part responsible for the astronomical housing prices.
Slavery is an economic transaction coerced by government under threat of force. Therefore, its wage is not a "market wage".
Renting an apartment is a voluntary transaction for both parties. Therefore, the money that changes hands is a "market rent".
Rents in SF are high not because of anything developers are doing but because it's a desirable place to live for many people, and many people are willing and able to pay high rents. It's desirable, not just because of its location and natural beauty, but because its infrastructure is highly subsidized by government.
If it's too expensive for you, don't live there; it's a simple as that.
You can cancel those contracts whenever you like, right?
So can they.
In fact, they already frequently do, and you don't even notice it because they just give you a new contract with new terms, and you keep paying.
I can easily say that with a straight face. Europeans have a long history of cultural chauvinism, bigotry, and ignorance about the rest of the world, and in particular about the US.