Economist Says Most of Billionaire Wealth Is Unearned
evonomics.com
evonomics.com
His main work is about reducing the possibility to extract "rents" from society by closing loopholes in our current economic system:
1. Money is "better" than everything else so those holding money can extract surplus value by lending it out. This was later also found out by Keynes and others. Keynes' solution: inflation. Gesell's solution: imposing carrying costs on cash.
2. Land is required by everybody yet impossible to increase. Solution: the goverment is owner of all land yet leases it out long-term by auction. All income is distributed among all mothers, since the price of land is direct consequence of the number of children/people in a country. Now you would distribute it among all citizens and call it "basic income".
His ideas are still completely valid and deserve a wider audience.
Isn't an inherent flaw in this that it encourages people to have as many children as possible?
I'm under the impression that at a point when your population is established you want something like a 1.2 birth rate, or just a little more than enough to cover your unexpected deaths.
Not when this income is lower than cost of raising child.
I concur, however, since I'd prefer it to be distributed among all residents, whether born in that country or not. But that's another discussion entirely.
If I do ever get to the point where I have enough unearned income to cover all my living expenses I plan to put it to good work.
the movement of wealth has a speed and a vector. all wealth moves along the path of least resistance, which means wherever it can move at high speed.
the more wealth at one node (an individual) is concentrated, the faster wealth moves toward that node, and thus it follows that the faster wealth moves toward one node the slower it must subsequently move in all future directions because there are substantially fewer people who have even greater wealth than the node. this means that all capital flows ultimately point to the richest of the rich, although there are a lot of other rich people who are enriched along the way.
rents are just a steady drumbeat of wealth moving from those with the least wealth of all nodes (proliterians) toward the middle or higher rung of nodes.
"unearned" is the wrong word. "structurally guaranteed" is a better term.
It's losing it's impact.