The alternative would be that nobody is allowed to post ANYTHING until someone has verified that it is either (1) not nudity/pornography, or else (2) that it comes accompanied with some kind of proof of permission.
I'm not talking about SF and places like that. Those are even more ridiculous. I just mean the median housing price across the entire state, which is about twice that of the country in general. I live (and always have lived and want to continue living forever) in an area with median-priced housing for the state. I make about twice the national median income, which (my income) is not much less than twice the California median income, and I have no debts (besides rent), so you'd think median-priced California housing should be affordable to me, but as it is, it would be a stretch for me just to afford the national median housing prices, and the California median is about twice that still. And the majority of other people in the state are even worse off than I am, both in terms of income and in terms of other debts.
It still seems unfathomable to be that in most of the rest of the country mortgage payments could possibly be less than rents. Can you show me some examples?
Toys are irrelevant when it comes to class and who controls the basic necessities. Take me to a future where everyone has personal Star Trek style replicators and holodecks but all of the land is controlled by a tiny handful of people so everyone else is still subservient to those people if they want to have a place to legally keep their replicators and holodecks and, you know...just exist somewhere at all...and I'll still call that a dystopia.
I'm not concerned about how much monopoly money the top 1% have compared to even the bottom 1%. I'm concerned that the vast majority of people are in one way or another forced into debt to that top 1% and can't even just sit and be poor all alone without being bothered if they want; they have to struggle constantly working for those with more than them just to justify their right to have a place to even starve to death in peace.
A poor African farmer who owns his own land with a hand-made shack on it and crops that he grows for his own food with his own tools passed down for generation is more middle-class than the waiter in New York who has a game console and a big screen TV but has absolutely no hope of ever escaping the perpetual insecurity of being thrown out into the street if he misses one month's rent.
Here in California —pretty much anywhere in California I've looked — just the interest on a mortgage would exceed the cost of rent you'd otherwise be paying. I have spent the past ten years fighting an uphill battle desperately trying to get to a place where I can stop throwing money down a rent-hole and actually start buying something I can eventually stop paying for. If "most places in the US" really are like you describe, and it's actually cheaper to buy than to rent (and looking at median incomes and housing prices, I have doubts about that), then that's awesome and the way things should be, but California is the most populous state, so there's still a huge chunk of the population stuck in a situation where renting and homelessness are their only options; and since homelessness is effectively illegal and not a reasonable option anyway, that means renting pretty much is obligatory.
I was too quick on the draw and thought from context that that was "obviously" a link to a different xkcd before clicking on it. I actually like the one he actually linked.
I was too quick on the draw and thought from context that that was "obviously" a link to a different xkcd before clicking on it. I actually like the one he actually linked.
From your earlier description I don't think I would describe you as "borrowing capital". You're laboring upon someone else's capital, but it's not like they've lent it to you and you owe it back, and you pay part of your income from your labor with it to service that debt. You're just selling your labor.
Even if using your employer's tools did count as "borrowing capital", you've also suggested that you have possible means of income that would not require "borrowing" like that, which in my book would still leave you middle-class because you're not borrowing out of necessity, you're just choosing to. It's like the difference between someone who rents because that's their only option besides homelessness, and someone who could totally buy a house at any time but rents because it's more convenient for them or something. I'd call the latter definitely (at least) middle class, but the former definitely not.
Someone else who responded to me already pointed out that Jews were actually prohibited from lending at interestto each other. But lending to gentiles was allowed. Christians also follow the Old Testament, and there's the famous scene where Jesus flips his shit over the money-changers in the temple, so there's also basis for Christians prohibiting it, though why they'd still allow Jews to do it in Christian lands, I'm not sure.
Capitalism is indeed a system where the only control on who buys what is the price.
That's not what capitalism is, and it's not what I said it was either. That is just a free market. Capitalism is something more than just a free market. It's not capitalism until it is possible to make money simply by having money (or other wealth), without working for it; basically, a system where property income is possible. That is not necessarily possible in every free market, though it's an open question as to how to prevent it without compromising the freedom of the market.
You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, but I think it's pretty clear that when people say "free of government regulations" they generally mean markets free of a specific kind of regulation, namely the kind obliging anyone to buy or sell anything to anyone at any specific price. But not one free of regulations against force and fraud.
In that same vein though, I think those same people generally assume that it is also not free of government enforcement of artificially created obligations, i.e. contracts, and that's a possible point of contention. A system with maximal (to use Hohfeldian terminology) liberties and immunities is consequently one with minimal claims and powers, and while plenty of free-market advocates bang a loud drum against claims more than minimal negative claims, they seems pretty gung-ho on allowing pretty extensive arbitrary power to contract, which does not automatically come part and parcel with a system that allows only the minimal claim to property and the minimal power to trade. It's an extra thing added on top of that minimal free market system.
I think it's that power to contract where all the problems with capitalism (and many other social problems) creeps in, and though I mostly make a big noise about certain specific kinds of contracts being problematic (those involving rent and interest), I've half a mind to throw contracts out entirely. The deontological half of my mind, arguing from first principles at least; that would obviously have fairly far-reaching consequences and unlike eliminating just rent and interest, I don't quite have thorough solutions to all the problematic consequences already in mind, so deontological arguments be damned, I'm not quite sure it's a good idea just yet.
without constraints on hoarding and manipulation [...]those who already have a lot will always be able to use that to their advantage
Not if we stop using force to enable that advantage. If we simply didn't enforce contracts of rent and interest, hoarding would become almost useless, because there would be no reliable way to extract value from those hoarded goods other than by selling them off proper (rather than lending them out), which would make them no longer hoarded. No need to stop people from accumulating; just need to stop enabling them to leverage that accumulation. They can still try if they want, but without enforcement of the agreements necessary to do that —and with standard laws against violence in place, to stop them from enforcing their own agreements — those efforts will depend entirely on the goodwill and trustworthiness of the people they're trying to take advantage of, and so not go very far. All by having government do less, not more.
I just realized you linked a different comic than I thought you had from your text. The one you actually linked is actually funny and not just the preachy bullshit he's been putting out lately. I retract that half of my comment.
And an outlier of the set "people" may likely find people in general to be stupidly really fucking dumb. Nobody ever said every single individual person is really fucking dumb.
That xkcd is just more of the recent bullshit Randall has started putting out lately. Comic is going downhill if you ask me.
You think that it is a bad thing to have many rich people, I think it is a *WONDERFUL* thing, it is a bad thing to have many poor people.
I think it is a bad thing to have "rich" or "poor" when those are defined in terms of necessity to work and borrow. I think it's a bad thing to have people who are "poor" in that they have no choice but to borrow, and for other people who are "rich" in that they have the choice to not work, at the expense of those others having no choice but to borrow. I want a middle-class world, where nobody has to borrow, and everybody has to work — at least, as much as anybody has to work at all, since to get back on topic, ideally technology will spare us all from work eventually. But if many people are still in a position where they have to borrow when that happens, and can only afford to borrow by working, and working is suddenly unnecessary, then they're all completely fucked, and either most of the world will just die (which you seem to think would be fine), or more likely they'll go down kicking and screaming and take you and all of civilization down with them. I don't like either of those options, but instead of focusing on how to fight the whole point of technology and make continual work for everyone (well, for those poor plebs who don't have the choice to not work), I'd rather focus on eliminating the need for anyone to borrow, and then we can all welcome the end of work and the glorious robot utopia that comes with it.
- as long as your solutions do not force me into any group behaviour by using threat of government violence, be my guest.
Wonderful, then we have no disagreement because I haven't advocated that.
- all lending with interest is investing.
But not all investing is lending with interest. Just like all capitalism is free-market but not all free markets are capitalist. Basic set theory here.
"Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property."
"As to Marx, keep it to yourself"
All I hear here is "la la la I can't hear you". You're arguing against things I'm not saying and ignoring the things I am saying. I'm done here. Except:
Money makes money and that is a GOOD THING, otherwise our ability to accumulate savings would always be bound by the amount of labour that we can add as value.
The amount of savings people can accumulate being proportional to their labor is a GOOD THING. If you are making money just by having money, without working, you are accruing the product of someone else's labor. Money sitting in a pile by itself doesn't magically multiply itself; people working with the things it buys is what generates new wealth. Every bit of new wealth generated is generated by someone, and if you're getting wealth that you didn't generate, you're getting it at someone else's expense.
(And because you apparently can't read: the above is not saying the market is a zero-sum game. Do not try to interpret it to mean that. Pay attention to the word "generate". New value is being made all the time. It's just a question of who keeps the value that who makes).
In answer to most of your questions, the division as I'm framing it is thus:
- If you have the option to not work (even if you do work), you are upper class. - If you don't have the option to not work, but you have the option to not borrow (even if you do in fact borrow), you are middle class. - If you don't have the option to not work, or even the option to not borrow, you are lower class.
And to be clear, I'm not just talking about borrowing money, but any kind of capital, including land, so anyone who is stuck renting their home (doesn't have the option to not rent) is lower class.
So how should one reasonably become a homeowner in a high cost of living area such as the Bay Area or New York, NY? Does the first step involve moving to some other city where your profession is practiced but which has a lower cost of living?
At present that appears to be the only option, but it doesn't sound like a reasonable option to me, and the necessity of it is a symptom of what I see as the root problem of capitalism, rent. Rent distorts the cost of real capital (and also the cost of labor) in multiple ways: it makes the capital in higher demand by those who can afford it outright, not for its intrinsic use-value but for the rents they can command by possession of it, and that increased demand increases the price and thus relative to if only people intending to use it for themselves were buying; and on the other hand, it gives a falsely "inexpensive" alternative to buying which is actually infinitely expensive in the long run, luring people who would otherwise have to buy into a trap that prevents them from becoming able to buy. In the absence of rent, say if it were just suddenly abolished entirely (which I don't advocate —I have plans for a more gradual, less painful transition), you would suddenly have a bunch of homeless people and a bunch of unoccupied homes; the unoccupied homes would then be of no value to their owners except as a useless asset to be sold off; but nobody else would want to buy those "useless" homes as "investment properties" anymore, since they can't be rented out, so the only people who would be in the market to buy them would be the people who actually want to live there themselves; most of the people who actually want to live there either already bought something there in the old market (and so aren't in the market to buy anymore), or couldn't afford to buy and so had to rent, i.e. the masses of now-homeless people; the only way the owners of those homes can get any value out of them is thus to sell them to the now-homeless former renters, which means selling them at prices and on terms (e.g. in installment payments) that those former renters could afford. And voila, suddenly it is affordable to buy housing in such places.
Of course, it might not work out quite so perfectly just like that, because not everybody who had been renting before would be able to afford even the new lower prices and easier terms of buying. But that's where the distortions of the labor market come in. Those people who couldn't afford it would be the people with the lowest-paying jobs, your waiters and store clerks and such, and if those people categorically cannot afford to live in that location, suddenly there is nobody available to wait tables or work registers, and demand for them goes up drastically. The people already living there can't take those jobs because they don't pay enough to live there and if they took them they wouldn't be able to live there anymore, leaving all those low-paying jobs still unoccupied, and the demand for them skyrocketing — in turn raising the price that will be offered for jobs in such high demand, until it reaches the level that those jobs actually pay enough for people to afford to live there.
With rent in existence, expensive places have a situation similar to a manorial lord and his servants, except spread out amongst more parties; the "servants" (the waiters and store clerks and such) are still subservient to th
Do you rent? That is a debt — an infinite debt in fact, one that you will never be done paying off. That makes you working class, unless you have other investments counteracting that (e.g. stock dividends sufficient to pay your rent), and don't have to constantly labor just to pay someone for the privilege of existing somewhere.
If you own a house already, and borrow $100k to buy a more expensive house, but already have enough equity in it that you could always fall back to a less expensive house again if necessary, then I would say you're still middle class. Having debt doesn't knock you out of the middle class; having to have it does. If you don't have enough capital to have any option but to constantly borrow it from others, you're working class, not middle class.
You seem to be replying to everything I've written in this thread without reading any of it.
Nowhere have I advocated redistribution of wealth. I have highlighted problems that come from uneven distribution of it, and more importantly, problems that create and perpetuate that uneven distribution in the face of natural market forces that would normally spread it out, and I've noted that there are solutions to those problems other than forced wealth redistribution, and that criticism of the problems is not tantamount to advocacy of that one "solution". But you can't seem to wrap your head around that last point, and think that pointing out the problem has to be tantamount to advocacy of one solution, even as I keep saying over and over again that I am not advocating that solution, but trying to bring attention to alternatives to it.
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property. That's all it is.
No, it is not. Read a fucking history of economics. You plugging your ears and insisting "capitalism just means a propertarian free market" doesn't make it so.
The rest of what you wrote is completely non-sequitur to anything I've been saying. I have no objection to some people paying other people to do jobs, and complex businesses of people all working together to be more productive than any of them individually. That is not "capitalistic exploitation"; that is just free trade of services. It's not capitalism until you get to talking about unearned income: someone making money simply by virtue of having money (or other capital), without having to actually work for it. If you're making money by working, including paying other people to work for you, and directing and coordinating them, that's great, that's the wonderful free market at work, but that is not capitalistic, except to the possible extent that you might be able to pay your workers less than they would really be willing to accept for their labor if they weren't bend over a barrel by other factors elsewhere — like rents and other debts. Those are where capitalism begins, people accruing wealth simply from letting others borrow their wealth, with no work required. Marx and his criticism of the workplace as exploitative was looking at the wrong end of the equation; the only reason people are desperate for work and can be taken advantage of by their employers is because they are beholden to the real capitalists elsewhere, their landlords and creditors.
Buying it slowly over time. There are fairly simple arrangements of pure sales which look and feel very rent-like on the short term but become more and more like the straight-up purchases they really are in the long term, which allows for the legitimate functions that rent appears to serve to be served, while circumventing the large scale systematic problems that is causes. I can explain in more detail if you like, but the basic picture is (to use housing rent as the paradigmatic example) that you start paying monthly payments exactly like you were renting, but you gradually build equity that you can get back out of it when you move, or you eventually end up owning it if you don't move.
(How much you get back when moving depends on how long you stay there, how urgently you need to move, and what choices you've made with regards to the upkeep of the place; if you want to move frequently with no hassle and no questions and have someone else guarantee all the upkeep for you, that's probably going to cost you similarly to ordinary rental, but if you just want to live somewhere semi-permanently and treat it nice while you're there and find a replacement for yourself when you do eventually move, but simply can't afford to just buy a place, you won't be stuck renting indefinitely; over your life you will gradually build up equity until you eventually own something somewhere).
Not on money, no, but it is effectively illegal to be homeless — there is nowhere you are allowed to even exist without paying someone for the privilege — so people are forced to borrow land "at interest" (renting it), and in almost all cases, if they every want to escape from that perpetual debt and trade it in for a temporary one that will eventually be paid off, there are not other options available but to borrow money.
2. Nobody is forcing you to survive.
Now I know you're just trolling. "You can always just kill yourself. That is an option. Would save us all a lot of trouble if we proper folk didn't have to deal with you rabble."
3. Nobody owes you anything free
I never said they did, and you seem stuck in the Marxist mindset that any criticism of capitalist exploitation entails a rejection of free markets and advocacy of forced wealth redistribution. There are other solutions besides state socialism, and just because you don't like that solution doesn't mean you can flatly deny the problem entirely.
As for most of the rest of your post, you're also confusing "investment" with "lending at interest". True investment is a purchase of equity: you buy into a business venture you think will be profitable and take a share of the risk and a share of the potential reward. That is the trivial solution to how capital can get allocated to productive ventures without having to involve interest at all. Nobody's going to buy a share of "Roman Mir Wants A Big-Screen TV, Inc.", but they might buy into "Roman Mir Widget Company" if they think you can turn a profit (for you and them both) with the money they pay you for shares in your company.
That is exactly the problem with rent. It's a cost that gives no asset in return, preventing people from building wealth even as they labor and earn more income than they need to pay for what they consume. How is someone who can barely make rent ever going to save up to buy any land anywhere? It's not like they can just start putting their rent money immediately toward interest-free payments that go entirely to building them equity in land. They need to save a big chunk for a down payment first, and then a big chunk of their monthly expenses is still going to interest. Rent and interest keep people from being able to get land of their own.
As for "imagination and drive" and "look for land where it's cheaper", it's completely unreasonable to expect, for example, the vast majority of the population of California, the most populous state of the union, most of whom cannot afford land there, to move halfway across the continent to places where their incomes would let them eventually escape rentespecially since, in those places, the likely would not be able to get even those meager incomes they already have, since all the jobs are in the populous and thus expensive places where people and businesses who need labor are at.
Slashdot Mirror
The alternative would be that nobody is allowed to post ANYTHING until someone has verified that it is either (1) not nudity/pornography, or else (2) that it comes accompanied with some kind of proof of permission.
I'm not talking about SF and places like that. Those are even more ridiculous. I just mean the median housing price across the entire state, which is about twice that of the country in general. I live (and always have lived and want to continue living forever) in an area with median-priced housing for the state. I make about twice the national median income, which (my income) is not much less than twice the California median income, and I have no debts (besides rent), so you'd think median-priced California housing should be affordable to me, but as it is, it would be a stretch for me just to afford the national median housing prices, and the California median is about twice that still. And the majority of other people in the state are even worse off than I am, both in terms of income and in terms of other debts.
It still seems unfathomable to be that in most of the rest of the country mortgage payments could possibly be less than rents. Can you show me some examples?
Toys are irrelevant when it comes to class and who controls the basic necessities. Take me to a future where everyone has personal Star Trek style replicators and holodecks but all of the land is controlled by a tiny handful of people so everyone else is still subservient to those people if they want to have a place to legally keep their replicators and holodecks and, you know...just exist somewhere at all...and I'll still call that a dystopia.
I'm not concerned about how much monopoly money the top 1% have compared to even the bottom 1%. I'm concerned that the vast majority of people are in one way or another forced into debt to that top 1% and can't even just sit and be poor all alone without being bothered if they want; they have to struggle constantly working for those with more than them just to justify their right to have a place to even starve to death in peace.
A poor African farmer who owns his own land with a hand-made shack on it and crops that he grows for his own food with his own tools passed down for generation is more middle-class than the waiter in New York who has a game console and a big screen TV but has absolutely no hope of ever escaping the perpetual insecurity of being thrown out into the street if he misses one month's rent.
Here in California —pretty much anywhere in California I've looked — just the interest on a mortgage would exceed the cost of rent you'd otherwise be paying. I have spent the past ten years fighting an uphill battle desperately trying to get to a place where I can stop throwing money down a rent-hole and actually start buying something I can eventually stop paying for. If "most places in the US" really are like you describe, and it's actually cheaper to buy than to rent (and looking at median incomes and housing prices, I have doubts about that), then that's awesome and the way things should be, but California is the most populous state, so there's still a huge chunk of the population stuck in a situation where renting and homelessness are their only options; and since homelessness is effectively illegal and not a reasonable option anyway, that means renting pretty much is obligatory.
I was too quick on the draw and thought from context that that was "obviously" a link to a different xkcd before clicking on it. I actually like the one he actually linked.
I was too quick on the draw and thought from context that that was "obviously" a link to a different xkcd before clicking on it. I actually like the one he actually linked.
From your earlier description I don't think I would describe you as "borrowing capital". You're laboring upon someone else's capital, but it's not like they've lent it to you and you owe it back, and you pay part of your income from your labor with it to service that debt. You're just selling your labor.
Even if using your employer's tools did count as "borrowing capital", you've also suggested that you have possible means of income that would not require "borrowing" like that, which in my book would still leave you middle-class because you're not borrowing out of necessity, you're just choosing to. It's like the difference between someone who rents because that's their only option besides homelessness, and someone who could totally buy a house at any time but rents because it's more convenient for them or something. I'd call the latter definitely (at least) middle class, but the former definitely not.
Someone else who responded to me already pointed out that Jews were actually prohibited from lending at interestto each other. But lending to gentiles was allowed. Christians also follow the Old Testament, and there's the famous scene where Jesus flips his shit over the money-changers in the temple, so there's also basis for Christians prohibiting it, though why they'd still allow Jews to do it in Christian lands, I'm not sure.
Capitalism is indeed a system where the only control on who buys what is the price.
That's not what capitalism is, and it's not what I said it was either. That is just a free market. Capitalism is something more than just a free market. It's not capitalism until it is possible to make money simply by having money (or other wealth), without working for it; basically, a system where property income is possible. That is not necessarily possible in every free market, though it's an open question as to how to prevent it without compromising the freedom of the market.
You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, but I think it's pretty clear that when people say "free of government regulations" they generally mean markets free of a specific kind of regulation, namely the kind obliging anyone to buy or sell anything to anyone at any specific price. But not one free of regulations against force and fraud.
In that same vein though, I think those same people generally assume that it is also not free of government enforcement of artificially created obligations, i.e. contracts, and that's a possible point of contention. A system with maximal (to use Hohfeldian terminology) liberties and immunities is consequently one with minimal claims and powers, and while plenty of free-market advocates bang a loud drum against claims more than minimal negative claims, they seems pretty gung-ho on allowing pretty extensive arbitrary power to contract, which does not automatically come part and parcel with a system that allows only the minimal claim to property and the minimal power to trade. It's an extra thing added on top of that minimal free market system.
I think it's that power to contract where all the problems with capitalism (and many other social problems) creeps in, and though I mostly make a big noise about certain specific kinds of contracts being problematic (those involving rent and interest), I've half a mind to throw contracts out entirely. The deontological half of my mind, arguing from first principles at least; that would obviously have fairly far-reaching consequences and unlike eliminating just rent and interest, I don't quite have thorough solutions to all the problematic consequences already in mind, so deontological arguments be damned, I'm not quite sure it's a good idea just yet.
without constraints on hoarding and manipulation [...]those who already have a lot will always be able to use that to their advantage
Not if we stop using force to enable that advantage. If we simply didn't enforce contracts of rent and interest, hoarding would become almost useless, because there would be no reliable way to extract value from those hoarded goods other than by selling them off proper (rather than lending them out), which would make them no longer hoarded. No need to stop people from accumulating; just need to stop enabling them to leverage that accumulation. They can still try if they want, but without enforcement of the agreements necessary to do that —and with standard laws against violence in place, to stop them from enforcing their own agreements — those efforts will depend entirely on the goodwill and trustworthiness of the people they're trying to take advantage of, and so not go very far. All by having government do less, not more.
I just realized you linked a different comic than I thought you had from your text. The one you actually linked is actually funny and not just the preachy bullshit he's been putting out lately. I retract that half of my comment.
And an outlier of the set "people" may likely find people in general to be stupidly really fucking dumb. Nobody ever said every single individual person is really fucking dumb.
That xkcd is just more of the recent bullshit Randall has started putting out lately. Comic is going downhill if you ask me.
You think that it is a bad thing to have many rich people, I think it is a *WONDERFUL* thing, it is a bad thing to have many poor people.
I think it is a bad thing to have "rich" or "poor" when those are defined in terms of necessity to work and borrow. I think it's a bad thing to have people who are "poor" in that they have no choice but to borrow, and for other people who are "rich" in that they have the choice to not work, at the expense of those others having no choice but to borrow. I want a middle-class world, where nobody has to borrow, and everybody has to work — at least, as much as anybody has to work at all, since to get back on topic, ideally technology will spare us all from work eventually. But if many people are still in a position where they have to borrow when that happens, and can only afford to borrow by working, and working is suddenly unnecessary, then they're all completely fucked, and either most of the world will just die (which you seem to think would be fine), or more likely they'll go down kicking and screaming and take you and all of civilization down with them. I don't like either of those options, but instead of focusing on how to fight the whole point of technology and make continual work for everyone (well, for those poor plebs who don't have the choice to not work), I'd rather focus on eliminating the need for anyone to borrow, and then we can all welcome the end of work and the glorious robot utopia that comes with it.
- as long as your solutions do not force me into any group behaviour by using threat of government violence, be my guest.
Wonderful, then we have no disagreement because I haven't advocated that.
- all lending with interest is investing.
But not all investing is lending with interest. Just like all capitalism is free-market but not all free markets are capitalist. Basic set theory here.
"Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property."
"As to Marx, keep it to yourself"
All I hear here is "la la la I can't hear you". You're arguing against things I'm not saying and ignoring the things I am saying. I'm done here. Except:
Money makes money and that is a GOOD THING, otherwise our ability to accumulate savings would always be bound by the amount of labour that we can add as value.
The amount of savings people can accumulate being proportional to their labor is a GOOD THING. If you are making money just by having money, without working, you are accruing the product of someone else's labor. Money sitting in a pile by itself doesn't magically multiply itself; people working with the things it buys is what generates new wealth. Every bit of new wealth generated is generated by someone, and if you're getting wealth that you didn't generate, you're getting it at someone else's expense.
(And because you apparently can't read: the above is not saying the market is a zero-sum game. Do not try to interpret it to mean that. Pay attention to the word "generate". New value is being made all the time. It's just a question of who keeps the value that who makes).
In answer to most of your questions, the division as I'm framing it is thus:
- If you have the option to not work (even if you do work), you are upper class.
- If you don't have the option to not work, but you have the option to not borrow (even if you do in fact borrow), you are middle class.
- If you don't have the option to not work, or even the option to not borrow, you are lower class.
And to be clear, I'm not just talking about borrowing money, but any kind of capital, including land, so anyone who is stuck renting their home (doesn't have the option to not rent) is lower class.
So how should one reasonably become a homeowner in a high cost of living area such as the Bay Area or New York, NY? Does the first step involve moving to some other city where your profession is practiced but which has a lower cost of living?
At present that appears to be the only option, but it doesn't sound like a reasonable option to me, and the necessity of it is a symptom of what I see as the root problem of capitalism, rent. Rent distorts the cost of real capital (and also the cost of labor) in multiple ways: it makes the capital in higher demand by those who can afford it outright, not for its intrinsic use-value but for the rents they can command by possession of it, and that increased demand increases the price and thus relative to if only people intending to use it for themselves were buying; and on the other hand, it gives a falsely "inexpensive" alternative to buying which is actually infinitely expensive in the long run, luring people who would otherwise have to buy into a trap that prevents them from becoming able to buy. In the absence of rent, say if it were just suddenly abolished entirely (which I don't advocate —I have plans for a more gradual, less painful transition), you would suddenly have a bunch of homeless people and a bunch of unoccupied homes; the unoccupied homes would then be of no value to their owners except as a useless asset to be sold off; but nobody else would want to buy those "useless" homes as "investment properties" anymore, since they can't be rented out, so the only people who would be in the market to buy them would be the people who actually want to live there themselves; most of the people who actually want to live there either already bought something there in the old market (and so aren't in the market to buy anymore), or couldn't afford to buy and so had to rent, i.e. the masses of now-homeless people; the only way the owners of those homes can get any value out of them is thus to sell them to the now-homeless former renters, which means selling them at prices and on terms (e.g. in installment payments) that those former renters could afford. And voila, suddenly it is affordable to buy housing in such places.
Of course, it might not work out quite so perfectly just like that, because not everybody who had been renting before would be able to afford even the new lower prices and easier terms of buying. But that's where the distortions of the labor market come in. Those people who couldn't afford it would be the people with the lowest-paying jobs, your waiters and store clerks and such, and if those people categorically cannot afford to live in that location, suddenly there is nobody available to wait tables or work registers, and demand for them goes up drastically. The people already living there can't take those jobs because they don't pay enough to live there and if they took them they wouldn't be able to live there anymore, leaving all those low-paying jobs still unoccupied, and the demand for them skyrocketing — in turn raising the price that will be offered for jobs in such high demand, until it reaches the level that those jobs actually pay enough for people to afford to live there.
With rent in existence, expensive places have a situation similar to a manorial lord and his servants, except spread out amongst more parties; the "servants" (the waiters and store clerks and such) are still subservient to th
Do you rent? That is a debt — an infinite debt in fact, one that you will never be done paying off. That makes you working class, unless you have other investments counteracting that (e.g. stock dividends sufficient to pay your rent), and don't have to constantly labor just to pay someone for the privilege of existing somewhere.
If you own a house already, and borrow $100k to buy a more expensive house, but already have enough equity in it that you could always fall back to a less expensive house again if necessary, then I would say you're still middle class. Having debt doesn't knock you out of the middle class; having to have it does. If you don't have enough capital to have any option but to constantly borrow it from others, you're working class, not middle class.
Ok, you sound squarely middle-class by my definition. I don't see why you'd think you wouldn't.
You seem to be replying to everything I've written in this thread without reading any of it.
Nowhere have I advocated redistribution of wealth. I have highlighted problems that come from uneven distribution of it, and more importantly, problems that create and perpetuate that uneven distribution in the face of natural market forces that would normally spread it out, and I've noted that there are solutions to those problems other than forced wealth redistribution, and that criticism of the problems is not tantamount to advocacy of that one "solution". But you can't seem to wrap your head around that last point, and think that pointing out the problem has to be tantamount to advocacy of one solution, even as I keep saying over and over again that I am not advocating that solution, but trying to bring attention to alternatives to it.
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property. That's all it is.
No, it is not. Read a fucking history of economics. You plugging your ears and insisting "capitalism just means a propertarian free market" doesn't make it so.
The rest of what you wrote is completely non-sequitur to anything I've been saying. I have no objection to some people paying other people to do jobs, and complex businesses of people all working together to be more productive than any of them individually. That is not "capitalistic exploitation"; that is just free trade of services. It's not capitalism until you get to talking about unearned income: someone making money simply by virtue of having money (or other capital), without having to actually work for it. If you're making money by working, including paying other people to work for you, and directing and coordinating them, that's great, that's the wonderful free market at work, but that is not capitalistic, except to the possible extent that you might be able to pay your workers less than they would really be willing to accept for their labor if they weren't bend over a barrel by other factors elsewhere — like rents and other debts. Those are where capitalism begins, people accruing wealth simply from letting others borrow their wealth, with no work required. Marx and his criticism of the workplace as exploitative was looking at the wrong end of the equation; the only reason people are desperate for work and can be taken advantage of by their employers is because they are beholden to the real capitalists elsewhere, their landlords and creditors.
Buying it slowly over time. There are fairly simple arrangements of pure sales which look and feel very rent-like on the short term but become more and more like the straight-up purchases they really are in the long term, which allows for the legitimate functions that rent appears to serve to be served, while circumventing the large scale systematic problems that is causes. I can explain in more detail if you like, but the basic picture is (to use housing rent as the paradigmatic example) that you start paying monthly payments exactly like you were renting, but you gradually build equity that you can get back out of it when you move, or you eventually end up owning it if you don't move.
(How much you get back when moving depends on how long you stay there, how urgently you need to move, and what choices you've made with regards to the upkeep of the place; if you want to move frequently with no hassle and no questions and have someone else guarantee all the upkeep for you, that's probably going to cost you similarly to ordinary rental, but if you just want to live somewhere semi-permanently and treat it nice while you're there and find a replacement for yourself when you do eventually move, but simply can't afford to just buy a place, you won't be stuck renting indefinitely; over your life you will gradually build up equity until you eventually own something somewhere).
1. Nobody forces anybody to take loans.
Not on money, no, but it is effectively illegal to be homeless — there is nowhere you are allowed to even exist without paying someone for the privilege — so people are forced to borrow land "at interest" (renting it), and in almost all cases, if they every want to escape from that perpetual debt and trade it in for a temporary one that will eventually be paid off, there are not other options available but to borrow money.
2. Nobody is forcing you to survive.
Now I know you're just trolling. "You can always just kill yourself. That is an option. Would save us all a lot of trouble if we proper folk didn't have to deal with you rabble."
3. Nobody owes you anything free
I never said they did, and you seem stuck in the Marxist mindset that any criticism of capitalist exploitation entails a rejection of free markets and advocacy of forced wealth redistribution. There are other solutions besides state socialism, and just because you don't like that solution doesn't mean you can flatly deny the problem entirely.
As for most of the rest of your post, you're also confusing "investment" with "lending at interest". True investment is a purchase of equity: you buy into a business venture you think will be profitable and take a share of the risk and a share of the potential reward. That is the trivial solution to how capital can get allocated to productive ventures without having to involve interest at all. Nobody's going to buy a share of "Roman Mir Wants A Big-Screen TV, Inc.", but they might buy into "Roman Mir Widget Company" if they think you can turn a profit (for you and them both) with the money they pay you for shares in your company.
That is exactly the problem with rent. It's a cost that gives no asset in return, preventing people from building wealth even as they labor and earn more income than they need to pay for what they consume. How is someone who can barely make rent ever going to save up to buy any land anywhere? It's not like they can just start putting their rent money immediately toward interest-free payments that go entirely to building them equity in land. They need to save a big chunk for a down payment first, and then a big chunk of their monthly expenses is still going to interest. Rent and interest keep people from being able to get land of their own.
As for "imagination and drive" and "look for land where it's cheaper", it's completely unreasonable to expect, for example, the vast majority of the population of California, the most populous state of the union, most of whom cannot afford land there, to move halfway across the continent to places where their incomes would let them eventually escape rentespecially since, in those places, the likely would not be able to get even those meager incomes they already have, since all the jobs are in the populous and thus expensive places where people and businesses who need labor are at.
Glad you like it. :-)