Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

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>The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality

This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation.

Now you got me on a rant:

With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy.

I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do.

So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.

I think you are just recognizing that capital is not wealth, and that the instinct to grow and preserve it is alienating you from solving the problems and generating the wealth thru cooperation with your neighbors. Buying locally, keeps more money circulating locally.

It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.

Fair enough, I seen "money" as a store of the work effort that was done to earn it...sort of like storing energy in a battery. Yes the "energy" needs to be able to flow. And yes it is a net benefit of the community to circulate the money among itself. I didn't rule this out as in my comment I did mention buying locally.

However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?

Yah, I mean, that's one take on it. A take that I still think confuses money with wealth and energy. That kind of metaphor works because it's still putting money as a stand-in, a generalization, an abstraction, for the social relations that reproduce our culture, that feed and clothe and educate and entertain us. It's a useful metaphor sometimes, but we should not mistake the map for the territory, the accounting for the experience.

The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction.

Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)

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