Reading Smith has been eye-opening on how much different the moral landscape is nowadays. Making money without working was frought upon in Smith days, even called parasitic by "the inventor of liberalism", while nowadays it's considered good.
I don't doubt for an instant that I work harder than QEII for example, but 2-300 years ago, a ruling class person would have probably worked somewhat hard, much like a CEO works today, since an entire ecosystem depended on the estate.
I doubt very much that a lord didn't understand what was bringing in the money for his estate, and the realities of what it means if the circumstances are not right to fulfil the criteria to bring in money.
(I sound like I'm advocating that this was a good thing or that I think they worked really hard, but I'm just postulating that we could be minimising their contributions based on our modern sensibilities and desire to dislike people of that class, and I include myself in that).
In the past they’d not only have to do these tasks but also actually rule. Being a ruler in general sounds like a pretty sweet gig but I’d have to imagine it’s similar to being an upper level manager in that your entire day is filled with meetings and requests for meetings.
Is it? I mean, I'm sure some people think it's good, but since the early 20th century I do think rentier income has increasingly been viewed as parasitic. If anything, I'd have said that the view that people should make their income by working rather than having stuff is much more mainstream now than in Smith's time.
Passive investment less so, but I think the remedy for that is decently high death duties and inheritance taxes. The more we close loopholes in those the better.
i argue the opposite - most people are not smart enough to know what investment is going to give the highest return. Passively invest means you let the market decide, and spend your time to improve your own worth and output.
From what I've seen it's not really those "in the know", but rather those convinced by half-assed explanations of what paid VPN subscriptions do by YouTube sponsorships.
The cost of the work required to provide those services is marginal - as clearly proven by the big profit margins.
Oh and those "free" services are paid by selling your privacy.
As for Market dominance, since when was being popular and making products a lot of people like and value somehow abhorrent?
Please argue in good faith...
Surely market abuse should allow them to significantly expand profitability, but it hasn’t. Overall profits yes, but that’s just because they have higher sales now.
There are some companies I would agree do abuse their positions significantly to distort markets. Google and Facebook have been caught explicitly doing so.
I do not recall this from WoN.
Quote please.
The writing style is utter treacle to me at least, and I set out to give it a go under my own steam (i.e. not for a class or similar)
as well as
> They [landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.
He describes economics; others put opinions into his words.
Parasitic does have a fairly strong negative connotation, and Smith doesn't literally use the word, but those two passages do seem to have somewhat of a negative connotation to them, to my reading.
The internet giants "reap where they never sowed".
I’m not justifying everything they do, or all their business practices, but if these companies didn’t provide those services someone else would. There’s a genuine need.
What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.
Nothing new. Industrialization in the 19th century was all about automation and created both poverty and inequality for factory workers.
This generalization is historically false. Please inform yourself.
In today's inflation-targeting macroeconomic framework, automation causes a decrease in the price of goods and labour, which would have a deflationary impact. To prevent structural deflation, interest rates are reduced, which increases the value of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.
So I think automation can also support rent-seeking, although more indirectly.
So what? Why would it automatically matter if Smith thought x y z? People were wrong about a great many things back then, including in the realm of morality.
Aristotle was wrong about a lot of things. Plato was wrong about a lot of things. They come across as mystical morons in hindsight. Freud was wrong about a lot of things.
Should it be surprising for Smith to be wrong about a lot of things? Of course not.
It's entirely moral to make money off of your money with minimum effort. For example having retirement capital that consists of a low cost S&P 500 index fund. It is not parasitic, even if Adam Smith incorrectly might think so. Were he alive today and were he to believe such to be immoral, his morality would be irrational, anti-human and plainly askew.
The notion of not earning money on your money because it'd be immoral or parasitic, is comically dumb. It's about as regressive as burning witches. It's morally, philosophically and functionally identical to saying you shouldn't repetitively yield from land (ie farming is immoral), that you shouldn't amplify your physical labor with tools, and forbid you repetitively yield from land with heavily automated machinery, much less machinery that you use more than once (it just keeps producing a return on investment from the deployed capital, a horrible sin!). And then there's saving money to buy things in bulk on greater discount. How dare anyone yield additional money from their immoral hoard of existing money.
I don't follow -- how does the fact that the money is used for retirement or in a low cost fund make it not parasitic? It seems to me to fit the definition pretty well.