Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzzzzzza | Hacker News Reader

mortgage slavery is the common thread

for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism.

engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest

america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all

View on HN

Why?

Seems to me owning what you create is the key, instead of having it ripped from your hands.

As if you can cleanly define "what you create". Or "you". Or "create".

Back to the philosophy playpen, John G.

I mean, yeah?

Markets are great at finding how much something is worth. uhhhh

Want to give some examples?

No examples needed. You can't adequately define "what you create", because nobody can. Where does your contribution begin, and end? Where does the contribution of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your society begin, and end? To what extent did you create anything, or was it just a remix? Is everything a remix? Who are you? You have a unified, continuous sense of self, but most contemporary psychology finds it fairly easy to take people through processes that break this down (as do a number of psychedelics).

We don't need simplistic randian objectivism - it fails to describe the nuance, the beauty, the depth, the wonder, the complexity and the truth of reality.

Oh knock it off.

By your logic you can’t even define what a definition is so your whole schtick goes poof.

Bad unfalsifiable philosophy like this is why people hate philosophy. You’re just deliberately confusing people and trying to make yourself seem clever by sucking people into this silly definitions game.

This sounds like you're in favor of giving weight to religious arguments in economics. But I doubt that you'd agree with that idea. The fact is that some things cannot be determined with sufficient precision and inclination to be dismissive of this fact creates its own problems.

Please give examples!

If it wouldn't exist without your efforts, then you created it. There's no mystery to it. People freely willing to pay for it with their own money is sufficient evidence.

But if it wouldn't exist without other's people efforts too, then what? And they may be people you don't know. They may be people who are dead.

"paying with their own money" ... ack, not this simplistic nonsense again. People temporarily gain control over some measure of various economic resources. It's not their own money, beyond some temporary mutual agreement. Tomorrow, it may not be.

Also, people pay for things regardless of the creator or the morality of its creation. Their willingness to pay for something speaks to their relationship with the thing, not that of the thing's nominal "creator".

You’re mixing different levels of abstraction and equivocating across them.

Sure, no human could produce anything modern on their own, without knowledge, training, support, materials, products, labor, etc. that comes from others. A child raised by wolves will never launch a new line of tennis shoes.

At the same time, no complex effort comes to be without someone’s motivation and effort to take the risk, coordinate the activity and see it through. It doesn’t have to be one primary person to do so, but it certainly can be. It is not difficult to look at the history of a given project and conclude who most acutely put it into motion. The choice to incentivize this acute influence has trade-offs, but many different societies across history have tried many variations of what / where to incentivize. Abstracted, that’s one of the main points being discussed here.

That doesn’t mean all stories about who started / created / produced something are told accurately. But to throw your hands up and say “everything comes from everyone” is completely useless when designing society with the goal of solving problems, providing for its members and improving the human condition.

I didn't say "everything comes from everyone".

I said "nothing comes one person".

Ergo, there is no "what you create", at least in the sense of being able to point at something and say "I did that, it is my creation".

Sure, we may use this a shorthand for situations where the proximal effort came from one person. But it's just a shorthand, and should not obscure the deeper truth.

I'm not discussing the general thrust of TFA or the overall comment thread, just another randian and their simplistic ideas about how the world works.

Ok no examples _needed_ but please provide some.

I made software that helps my clients. I sell it for $1000/mo. I get $1000/mo and pay taxes on it. I have created $1000/mo.

Please explain what's not fair about this? The intricate nuance I'm missing? LOL

Let's say I work with one other person and pay them $1/hr, which they accept. They make my idea. I end up paying them like 100 and I make 1000/mo forever

Where's the nuance there?

1. you didn't create $1000/mo. You did something that caused the (temporary) transfer of control over $1000/mo of economic resources into your hands. That means that what you did was not judged as useless by everyone else in the society where you live - and that's good!

But the value of your software is utterly contingent on the full context of where you live. As many have noted, there are many highly paid jobs in (say) the USA that would simply have no value if you attempted to perform them in, say, Sudan (especially right now). So that $1000/mo is predicated on the work that others have done to create a context where your work actually has some value. Take that context away (or destroy it), and your work is close to worthless. So, where does the value in your work actually come from? No doubt some comes from you ... but how much is a lot harder to define.

2. I never said anything about fair.

3. I have no idea what your $1/hr example is intended to demonstrate.

1. What caused the transfer? If not value creation, why was it worth transferring? LOL

2. Ok, so capitalism is fair, then? you get paid what you're worth and control that value privately ... uhh...?

3. Explain the nuance of ownership there, what am I missing that makes it unfair?

> more land

So does S. America, which has never been prosperous.

argentina and venezuela have gone through periods of prosperity. Rule of law is too unstable for the system to get off the ground. Also political intervention by foreign actors, resource curse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com