paloalto90 on 27/11/2008 at 16:23

---

If you had a printing press and could print money that would be accepted by everyone,and then could control the money through contracting and expanding the dollars in the system,how powerful would you be?During contraction you would buy up assests at much lower cost than they are actually worth and during expansion you would make money off the interest rate from loaning money.And then you get people to pay for the printing cost through taxation,now that is a sweet deal.



Pretty subjective if you ask me.Take a family of four.Is the government going to tell you that saving money for all of your kids to go to college is too greedy and you can only send x number of kids?

Will it be waying that decision against societys needs whatever that is?

Kolya on 27/11/2008 at 17:01

---

The point is that it wouldn't be subjective. And arguing with an assumed unsocial execution of an inherently social idea is ... not nice. Especially since I hadn't said anything about what practical regulations would look like.

Morte on 27/11/2008 at 17:59

---

Money is just a medium of exchange, it's not actual wealth. Adding more money to the system just devalues it. You're more than a bit confused here.

The way to make a society wealthier is to reduce the amount of effort you have to expend to make stuff. There's enough wealth to go around already for most people to live comfortably*, it's just hilariously unevenly distributed, and that's what needs fixing if you're going to get the vast majority living decently.

Of course, we might one day get nerd-raptured away by nanomachines to a post-scarcity society, but I doubt that's going to happen.


*provided "average home" doesn't mean a house in suburbia, natch.

Printer's Devil on 28/11/2008 at 00:04

---

Ah, but that's where you run into the human notion of the future. Whether it be kings or presidents, churches or corporations, having more than you need helps to ensure future success. Having a headstart makes your descendants (genetic or conceptual) potentially more successful and powerful. It's going to be hard to erase that particular idea.

Hidden_7 on 28/11/2008 at 05:15

---

A few things...

First off, as has been mentioned before, money is just a system to represent wealth, it is only instrumentally good, so I assume (from your examples) you are talking about wealth, not money, so we can go on to that.

Secondly, at one point you reference "all humanity" which I assume to mean the 6 annabit billion people on earth. There is absolutely no way every one of those people could live the lifestyle of a middle-upper-middle class American. Period. No economic system could support it, and the planet certainly couldn't. The western world can only live the way it does because much of the world doesn't.

Thirdly, even if you were to restrict it so that it is only everyone in America needs "enough" (it is a pretty high standard you set for "enough") the capitalistic system that I think you mean when you talk about "money" is not designed for that. Like... in principle, that is absolutely not one of its goals. The capitalistic system in place is in theory concerned with equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, which is what you are talking about. The entire system implicitly, I'd actually suggest explicitly, recognizes the need for an inequality of outcome. There are plenty of jobs which need to be done that people would not do unless they needed to that do not necessitate the wages that would allow someone to live comfortably as you describe it. That is, there are jobs that do not justify a comfortable living wage, and were it the case that it were required that a living wage be paid the job would be eliminated.

Consider that we decide we need Starbucks in our society, since the paradigm of the good life you suggest is the fairly stereotypical American Dream I imagine you want society to stay as similar as possible, so, Starbucks. Ok, so now we have decided we need Starbucks, so we have to staff it, someone has to do that job. However we want to pay our employees a comfortable living wage, for what you suggest as "enough" money I'm going to go with an extremely conservative estimate of $50,000 annually. I mean, an average house, a car, three kids (kids are expensive), the occasional luxury item, maybe you want to send your kids to university, that seems like a fair minimum number. That means every Starbucks employee needs to get paid $26/hr. I would hazard a guess that Starbucks pay currently probably starts around minimum, that's $8/hr where I come from, I recognize it's considerably lower in a lot of places in the States. Maybe up to 12ish for a managerial position? So we've more than doubled the wage of all Starbucks employees. Those costs have to come from somewhere, it's unlikely franchises will just let that eat out of their profits - wouldn't be very fiscally responsible - so they are going to have to raise the cost of coffee to compensate.

I'm no economist, so I'm not sure exactly how much you'd need to raise prices to offset paying 2-3 employees on at any given time 2-3 times more money, but it's not nothing. So now coffee costs more money, living the American life suddenly just got a little more expensive. Only you have to do this across the entire service industry. Also for civic things too, waste management types, bus drivers, so on and so forth, so taxes and prices on all those things go up too. Suddenly everyone needs a little more money to live a comfortable life.

The current concept of the American "Good Life" in rather inexorably tied to the capitalistic system, which is absolutely not designed to achieve equality of outcome. It absolutely does not care about that, it is not one of its goals, proponents of it do not even think it SHOULD be a goal. If you want equality of outcome you have to look to Communist and Socialist systems, which are going to require a society set up quite a bit different from the current American one to function correctly.

So uh... to answer your question, yes the current capitalistic system is in principle opposed to "working" (for your definition of "working") for everyone.