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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

Money is not a system of control. Debt is a system of control.

When you take out a loan, you are now obligated to pay the money back with interest at some time in the future. Some part of your future efforts are no longer yours to do with as you choose, but have to be directed towards an economically productive activity that will raise the money to pay the lender.

Debt is the real whip that drives the workforce in the capitalist system based on hourly and salaried compensation. Ownership of slaves and physical whips are no longer needed. The debt and employee system is more efficient, since workers can be laid off and not supported when not needed.

Debt is also older than money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

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If you read Debt The First 5000 Years and don't think money is a system of control, then you really haven't read that book. Also, Money IS Debt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJW7hl8oqM).

David Graeber on basic income - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEb4Bda_06c

David Graeber: "DEBT: The First 5,000 Years" | Talks at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs

> Money is not a system of control. Debt is a system of control.

As if money and debt are unrelated. Debt is a function of money, and most of us are born in debt because the country we are born in keeps lending money(trillions). We have to acquire money to get and stay out of debt.

Money in the form of coin, currency or emoney is a medium of exchange and store of value.

Debt, although denominated in amounts of currency units, is a contractual obligation to pay money at a future date. It's a legal contract enforceable at law using the machinery of the state.

For example, if a bitcoin holder lends you bitcoin to buy a house, the mortgage is still a contract between you and the bitcoin lender. The mortgage has nothing to do with the bitcoin system. It is still registered by the government, and the sheriff still comes to evict you if you don't pay up.

> Debt is the real whip that drives the workforce in the capitalist system based on hourly and salaried compensation.

Even without any debt I still have to work to feed and shelter myself though..

I'm amazed at the inflexibility of work and massive variance in pay. I have two compsci degrees and a good number of years in computer security. There aren't really any part time work options for me. I could go to a big N and make 250k+ per year, but there aren't any jobs where I can work for 3 days a week and make 100k per year.

As well, if I'm looking to switch fields, I'm pretty confident I could get comfortable in a new domain in a month or so. Still, I don't think anyone would hire me in those domains (e.g. GIS / remote sensing).

Then there is the option of if I wanted to get out of computers all together. Yoga instructors don't make enough for me to justify that career move to myself.

Where are our 3d printed houses and autonomous indoor farms? With that I could probably figure out what I actually wanted my life to be and what would make me happy, rather than just playing in the system of maximizing income and telling myself I'm doing well.

Thought about contracting/consulting?

Not totally sure where to start with it. That might be the right answer though.

I agree by now we should have more flexible work options at companies but I think they're held back by a combination of corporate policies that make them annoying to work with at the manager level (at my workplace we have them but they have to be renewed every year by you, your manager, and their boss) and a certain culture that favors butts in seats for ease of access and plain simplicity (eg: if the person is important in your decision chain or knows how to do something working 3 days a week can mean a 4 day delay for any work/communication if it comes at the wrong time).

> Where are our 3d printed houses and autonomous indoor farms?

The shell or frame is the single most expensive part of the house but there's a lot more that has to be done to turn the concrete shell into a livable home: utilities, interior fixtures, interior finish, exterior finish, foundation, site readying.

As for the farms there are some but they're toys because open air farming is so much cheaper that there's no real money behind the indoor farm idea at the moment, until land or transport becomes much more expensive the cost of providing all the light for the plants is going to lose out to getting it for free. Also robotic handling of small plants isn't really there yet, partially because there's cheap labor that can do everything already and partially because it's a hard set of problems to generically pick and handle all types of produce.

Apart from contracting, you can try 2 years working, 1 year leisure. But this will impact your career, if you care about that kind of thing.

All money is debt. The ones in your pocket are borrowed, the ones that you put in the bank dont even exist

If you get rid of the part where you have to repay your debts, it's just theft.

you say that like it's a bad thing. if people are starving and some person has excess food that they can't even eat, it's good to steal that person's food.

Could you open up the logical process on how it's okay to steal someone's hard earned food?

That is actually well established by legal and moral doctrine with necessity as a defense and lesser harms. Just as nobody would be charged with vandalism if they cut open a drain cover to rescue a trapped child - someone dying of starvation is a far greater harm than petty theft. The reason why mugging can be responded to with lethal force but not shoplifting for instance is because the previous includes a threat to another's life and there is no hard guarantee that compliance will save the victim.

There are plenty of aspects of nuance with it of course including 'stealing to save yourself from starvation and causing someone else to starve' isn't morally right along with 'stealing when there were other viable alternatives without harm' is wrong.

And of course messy matters of scale when things get really messed up like the Great Depression where farmers may have had plenty of food but were fiscally precarious - and many of the hungry couldn't afford it - one person shoplifting bread may be a lesser harm but if farms were robbed enmasse could cause them to go under.

TL;DR - It is complicated and circumstantial.

Hey Nasrudith,

I think you are on a interesting topic, but seems like you are comparing some quite different things.

In your example cutting open a drain cover is not directly away from anyone, where as stealing food is.

The thing you seem to be missing in your case, is that you are not taking into account the time factor and only looking at a single action.

I agree that cutting open a drain cover (vandalism) is less bad when saving a trapped child. However, I do not agree that there should be nothing bad happening to the cutter. Imagine if instead of a drain cover it was someone's house.

Would breaking a window and then being absolved of all responsibility be okay? Should there not be a middle ground where nobody is solely at a loss.

Perhaps the breaker could pay for part of the new window? Perhaps the city could pay for the window as appreciation for the effort of saving one of their citizens?

Perhaps here instead of stealing, the bread could be loaned, or sold at a cheaper price to those in need.

Do you see what I am saying here?

No, it's not. Because life isn't that simple.

Investors and lenders play an important role in the economy. If theft makes what they do impossible it will cause a drop in the total productivity of the country as a whole. Which is to say stealing from them, especially at scale, is likely to cause far more starvation than it will solve.

Your idea has been tried: the peasants were hungry, it was the Kulaks with the excess food and money and the process of taking it from them was called dekulakization. Between 500,000 and 5,000,000 people died. This also led to the Holodomor with its estimated 7.5 million dead.

This all started with the observation that there were rich people and poor people right next to each other, and that taking from the rich to give to the poor must be a good thing. But it turned out to be one of the worst events in human history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

that's pretty hilarious if it's actually the way you think. according to you, having progressive taxation is exactly the same thing as millions of people dying due to a natural disaster. how am i even supposed to have a conversation with such an irrational position.

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