> Markets for air already exist where scarcity prevails:
Scarcity is not the issue here. Energy is the issue. This is where you lack intense knowledge.
In every scenario you describe energy was used to compress the air and place it into the canister. That it productive work.
For air and land in your typical scenario, there is zero productive work. This is what I'm referring too. Your scarcity argument is off topic. Nobody is talking about that scarcity in your sense. What we are talking about is artificially induced scarcity. By owning air, and owning more land that I need, I artificially induce scarcity and force people to pay me rent to live off of land I don't need and contributed nothing to the economy in exchange for economic gain.
The important factor here is that each instance of artificially induced scarcity sets up a scenario where the person who owns capital does not have to contribute to the GDP in order to benefit from the profits coming out of the asset. I'm not going to be paying a dime for the house I currently will own or sell. I am simply using a complex financial tool, to redirect wealth towards me.
>I already described some criteria for unfair transactions: compulsion or deception. You could also make arguments that if one side captures nearly all the economic surplus, the transaction is unfair (generally maintained via government-enforced monopolies limiting competition).
What do you think is going on when "one side" owns property that can house 400 people and just rents it all out? Also who do you think actually allows one person to own more property than they need or to even own air if such a concept existed? The Government.
>Rather than trying to assert Adam Smith's obsolescence, you should probably try googling "Adam Smith landlord". I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet).
What do you mean trying to assert? You're the one talking about an invisible hand in a world that is clearly not auto-magically heading towards equilibrium. Nobody and I mean basically nobody deciding economic policy and nobody in academia thinks this stuff is relevant in the discussion of a modern economy. If you knew what you were talking about you'd realize that I'm not asserting anything. I'm just restating the assertions of the rest of the world. https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand
Heck, why do you think the Fed exists if Adam Smith had any relevancy today? Why do you think bubbles and market crashes exist? Adam Smith is basically famous for being like Sigmund Freud. The Father of a modern academic field of study but still mostly wrong in the face of scientific evidence. By referencing him in a conversation about the modern economy makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
As for the quotes, it's not that I don't understand the context of "quotes" it's just that you're not quick enough to grasp the context of why I used the "quotes." See? I did again, let's see if you can kick that brain into gear and "grasp" why I chose to put the quotes around this "word."
Sorry you were offended - I was suggesting you would enjoy quotations from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" where he describes landlords as non-productive leeches. I was not commenting on the use of quotation marks.
My suggestion that you also pay attention to the context was that those quotations really do apply to unimproved land (though he notes that landlords will happily increase rents based on tenants'improvements).
No you are being deliberately offensive. It’s like me suggesting you go to school to take an economics course. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m just being nice and trying to help you not be stupid.
Too put it tersely some people on HN throw under the cover insults by being subtly condescending so as to not trip any red flags and get warned by the admin. For example, like suggesting I look up the purpose of quotations.
Don’t play games, I hate that stuff and while manipulative under the cover insults can get around Dang’s filter it really goes against the spirit of HN.
" I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet). "
This is what you said about my penchant to use quotation marks. There's not a single person on the face of the earth who won't find that rude.
It's subtle but it's akin to saying "go learn English" or "go learn proper grammar" in the middle of a debate but disguised as a "suggestion." You can't even say that garbage to a person who speaks English as a second language.
It's a low blow and I'm calling you out for what you are. You did that on purpose and you are a rude person. Your initial apology is therefore not accepted because I know it's fake.
We're done. I have no interest in continuing a conversation with you.
>For air and land in your typical scenario, there is zero productive work.
Someone has to build the property.
Someone has to maintain the property.
Someone has to own the property and its associated risk.
Someone has to pay taxes on the property.
Someone has to find a tenant that lives in the property.
Someone has to be rich enough to do all of the above, lots of people aren't. So the work gets split over multiple people. For example, a developer wants to focus on building properties, this means he wants to sell the entire property as soon as possible so he can start building the next property instead of waiting for the first property to pay off. This requires a market for real estate. Someone who buffers the stock and makes it available to renters or future buyers.
>What we are talking about is artificially induced scarcity.
How is land artificially scarce? If anything, it is naturally scarce and landlords make it less scarce through vertical scaling of the land. Given enough landlords there will be more housing than people and tenants will have an upper hand during negotiations. How is that not to their benefit? Take any existing housing market and eliminate 50% of landlords. Will this benefit tenants? No, in fact you want more landlords so that they end up competing against each other.
>The important factor here is that each instance of artificially induced scarcity sets up a scenario where the person who owns capital does not have to contribute to the GDP in order to benefit from the profits coming out of the asset. I'm not going to be paying a dime for the house I currently will own or sell. I am simply using a complex financial tool, to redirect wealth towards me.
The fact that outsize returns exist is a price signal that not enough people are doing this. If the risk free return is really as great as you say then everyone should jump into this market and reduce the risk free return until it reaches 0.
>What do you think is going on when "one side" owns property that can house 400 people and just rents it all out? Also who do you think actually allows one person to own more property than they need or to even own air if such a concept existed? The Government.
That is just the consequence of having to build large scale 50 story properties. If such a massive building is needed then it's a necessary evil.
I honestly don't understand your point. Whether an economic system favors workers or capital owners is purely a function of unemployment. Once unemployment is low enough inflation will pick up and completely decimate the ability to have an easy return on capital through unproductive endeavors. You're confusing the current system being unfair with the system always being unfair which is absolutely untrue. There is absolutely no guarantee that it will stay like this forever, if there is enough will power.
EDIT: Bonus plot
Zimbabwe had a land reform around the 00s. Mugabe wanted to redistribute the land of current wealthy white land owners because they obtained this land through British colonialism and thus never paid anything to acquire it and black land owners only got the worst land available. At first the government simply purchased farm land and made an agreement with the UK that it should cover some of the costs. So far so good. 3 million hectares were handed over without any big problems. But for some reason this wasn't enough. The plan was to acquire 11 million hectares but it was impossible to finance so violent repossession started.
There are obvious problems with this. First of all, redistributing all land, all at once is a recipe for disaster. The new owners don't get enough time to learn the ropes of farming. Some of them just become absentee farmers and fail to produce any food whatsoever. Others didn't get loans/financing from banks to start their own farm. So they could never buy the necessary equipment to actually run a productive farm. Worst of all, some people merely joined the program for personal enrichment without caring at all about how their farms are doing.
The government conveniently forgot that although the farms were owned by "rich evil" white land owners, the vast majority of the work was done by black people and they were reasonably compensated for their work. Maybe they deserved more money but they did have a job that paid the bills and let them live an average life in Zimbabwe. The land owner might have been a parasite but he was a parasite that cared about its host (the land).
The new black land owners didn't, because they felt entitled to their new possession. After all they fought long and hard for this, they spent a lot of time protesting, suffering from colonialism and so on. In their mind they already put in the hard work that made them worthy of owning the land which is perfectly fine but the way the land had been redistributed caused massive external damage. There are plenty of ways of making it fair for everyone involved, for the new black owners, for the new white owners but nobody cared. They just rallied for a populist political cause.
Remember all the black farm hands? Underutilized farms mean they end up unemployed. The average Zimbabwean consumer? Without food because production crashed. The government? With a huge deficit because the cash crop export industries collapsed and an obligation to import food from foreign countries. People's wealth? Gone because food imports have to be funded through printing money.
Your primary goal as a nation should be to take advantage of these "suckers" (the white land owners/investors) until you are strong enough to stand on your own feet, not kick them out.
I don’t pay a dime for for the property. I don’t pay taxes, I don’t pay for maintenance, I didn’t pay for the cost of building the property, I don’t even pay interest for the loan. I just applied for the loan and my tenants pay for the rest.
Land is made more scarce then it actually is. We all live on land so there is plenty to go around. The artificially induced scarcity comes from the fact that people live on land they don’t own. For this to happen it means Certain people own more land then they need. The extra land is not owned for personal utility, it is bought so that another person has no choice but to pay you money to use the land.
Everyone would jump into the market if they could. The reason why they don’t is because you need to front a lot of money to buy property. So if a house costs a million I can just buy the house and rent it out. I didn’t lose the million because I can always resell the house and I gained rental income on top of that. What prevents people from executing this strategy is that they don’t have 1 million dollars. For a loan, barrier to entry is lowered to the down payment.
It’s not a necessary evil. The most successful economies today involve a combination of capitalism and socialism. An aspect of the economy, like property can be enforced to be made fair. It’s never been tried but in no way would I call it a necessary evil. Either way I benefit from this evil so I’m against it.
You don’t understand because your reasoning is off. Owners of capital are protected from inflation because most owners of capital don’t own cash. Inflation is a phenomenon related to cash lowering in value. Owning assets that are not cash tends to make inflation not apply. Poor people tend to own cash and rich people tend to own assets, hence during inflation poor people tend to lose. Poor people continue working hard while their salaries stay the same and get inflated. The work that they do improves the worth of the company they work for. Who owns that company? The owners of capital. In short the owners of companies pay people less for productive labor.
Then a feedback loop occurs where laborers can no longer purchase as much from a company and the companies begin to lose as well. Overall the feedback loop hits companies later. Inflation hits the workers first during inflation.
But this is besides the point. My point is capital grows faster then productive labor. The main reason why this happens is because capital represents the output of productive labor in aggregate. This output in wealth allows owners of capital to easily climb over barriers for entry and purchase more capital. It’s like playing Texas Holdem, the more chips you have the more power you have.
I read your example, transfer of knowledge is a separate issue. The shock to immediately changing a system also can have bad side effects. I’m not suggesting that the current status quo should be fixed either, nor am I suggesting there is a easy solution. I am saying that in the status quo I benefit from money gifted to me by my tenants while contributing nothing to the economy.
Scarcity is not the issue here. Energy is the issue. This is where you lack intense knowledge.
In every scenario you describe energy was used to compress the air and place it into the canister. That it productive work.
For air and land in your typical scenario, there is zero productive work. This is what I'm referring too. Your scarcity argument is off topic. Nobody is talking about that scarcity in your sense. What we are talking about is artificially induced scarcity. By owning air, and owning more land that I need, I artificially induce scarcity and force people to pay me rent to live off of land I don't need and contributed nothing to the economy in exchange for economic gain.
The important factor here is that each instance of artificially induced scarcity sets up a scenario where the person who owns capital does not have to contribute to the GDP in order to benefit from the profits coming out of the asset. I'm not going to be paying a dime for the house I currently will own or sell. I am simply using a complex financial tool, to redirect wealth towards me.
>I already described some criteria for unfair transactions: compulsion or deception. You could also make arguments that if one side captures nearly all the economic surplus, the transaction is unfair (generally maintained via government-enforced monopolies limiting competition).
What do you think is going on when "one side" owns property that can house 400 people and just rents it all out? Also who do you think actually allows one person to own more property than they need or to even own air if such a concept existed? The Government.
>Rather than trying to assert Adam Smith's obsolescence, you should probably try googling "Adam Smith landlord". I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet).
What do you mean trying to assert? You're the one talking about an invisible hand in a world that is clearly not auto-magically heading towards equilibrium. Nobody and I mean basically nobody deciding economic policy and nobody in academia thinks this stuff is relevant in the discussion of a modern economy. If you knew what you were talking about you'd realize that I'm not asserting anything. I'm just restating the assertions of the rest of the world. https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand
Heck, why do you think the Fed exists if Adam Smith had any relevancy today? Why do you think bubbles and market crashes exist? Adam Smith is basically famous for being like Sigmund Freud. The Father of a modern academic field of study but still mostly wrong in the face of scientific evidence. By referencing him in a conversation about the modern economy makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
As for the quotes, it's not that I don't understand the context of "quotes" it's just that you're not quick enough to grasp the context of why I used the "quotes." See? I did again, let's see if you can kick that brain into gear and "grasp" why I chose to put the quotes around this "word."