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I think your viewpoint stems in a belief that there is only so much money to go around. Your view about a landlord taking money is kind of a micro view. I am a landlord…the house I rent I actually built. It is an asset that people are willing to give me money to use for a while…they get a place to live…IF I could not have ever rented it out I would have never built it…it would be a worthless piece of ground that nobody would want to live on…this is how the world works…when I die, I will give it to my son…he will rent it out. Are you saying that he also would be “taking” money from people?

So if you didn't build the house, no one would've and people would live on the streets? No, people need a place to stay and the house would get built even if renting was impossible. We would just figure out different ways to pool money to build houses. House prices would also come down if wealthy people couldn't store their money into land.

So, in the many thousands of years of men trying every which way…this has not happened. So, unless someone has found a better way capitalism is the best way so far.

What? Of course this has happened.

I grew up in a council house. I.e. a house created by pooled money in the form of taxes.

Houses must exist. Landlords are an inefficiency to be optimized out.

How many houses did investors build vs how many houses did the government build…from the money they actually took from somebody else? And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?

If you build your houses from money, they’re not going to stand for very long. Houses are built from bricks.

Though for what it’s worth, the government at least has the advantage that it can print its own money, so it doesn’t need to take it from somebody else, unlike investors.

> How many houses did investors build vs how many houses did the government build…

Strictly speaking the answer is zero and zero. They use the money they have to have construction workers build the houses.

> from the money they actually took from somebody else?

Is this supposed to imply someone is taking money from others and the other does not? I know the view that government taxes is basically theft, and I think this view is ludicrous: citizen get that back in the form of infrastructure and public services, and in a functioning democracy it's basically their collective will that decided how to allocate that money. (How functioning the democracy really is is another debate.)

Investors on the other hand… well there are two kinds: those who worked for their money, and those who took it from workers. And it's a spectrum too, it depends how much of your income comes from your work, and how much comes from your possessions. Now I can guess most small landlords like yourself probably paid their houses with money they earned through actual work. Some even have constructed the houses themselves. But if that Second Thought video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m7WmKJZyQ has any accuracy the majority of rented houses are rented by big landlords, and those definitely did not earn their money through their own work (the clerks that work under them do, but they don't own the houses and are paid a meagre salary, compared to the renting money they manage).

I can't speak for government constructed houses, but given the above, your average investor-owned house was constructed or bought with money that was taken from people working for the investor. (Well strictly speaking the worker creates value for their boss, which gives a salary in return, but there's always a difference between value created and salary returned. That difference is the exploitation/theft part. And I'm glossing over the fact that managing a company is valuable work unto itself.)

> And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?

Am I supposed to answer "the investor's houses"? A citation is needed for that answer, and it'd better control for when the house is build (construction norms tend to evolve over time), how much it actually cost, and in some cases who it actually cost. Suburbian houses may be nice for instance, but the car dependency and the unsustainable infrastructure costs definitely are not.

It's completely plausible that a nation with a wealth of natural resources but an economic system that treats people terribly could win a series of wars and establish its economic system as the dominant one in the world, and then use its power to maintain status quo.

A marketplace of ideas does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes, or even good outcomes.

Suppose the marketplace of ideas is an unregulated marketplace. Then the wealthy and powerful can use their wealth and power to determine the world that other people see, getting those people to mistakenly fight for things that help the wealthy and powerful.

But suppose it's kept a fair marketplace. Fairness is not natural – it's a human value that we have to actively maintain. But suppose we succeed. Even then, the marketplace may not select the best ideas, because people have emotional needs – like belonging to community – that will cause them to stubbornly reject good ideas. But we accept this because it's the only way for us to live with each other; if I want you to let me disagree with you, I have to let you disagree with me.* The price of intellectual freedom is very, very steep, even if it's worth it.

So I don't believe the fact that capitalism is dominant is good evidence that it's the best idea so far. In fact, I think we have little evidence of it at all.

* There are of course complications of the Popperian, paradox-of-tolerance sort, where we do have to fight to the death, so to speak. If someone repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise or act fairly, they've left you the choice of letting yourself perish or eliminating them, which is a shitty situation to be in.

> It's completely plausible that a nation with a wealth of natural resources but an economic system that treats people terribly could win a series of wars and establish its economic system as the dominant one in the world, and then use its power to maintain status quo.

FWIW, Adam Smith has argued that this is unlikely. The world seems to prove him correct.

That said I do disagree with the way GP's argues the point. While the dominant economic system is likely more effective at creating dominating economies, it's not a given that it is good at being fair. Shutting down discussion while claiming that "capitalism is the best so far" because nobody else has come up with an alternative reeks of willful ignorance. It's easy to believe something is the best if you don't actively look for alternatives and demand others to serve it to you on a silver platter.

I was trying to be careful by writing "treats people terribly" rather than "treats its people terribly", having imperialist nations in mind, or "treats all people terribly", having class-divided societies in mind.

I didn't realize that Adam Smith had argued on this point, though! Thank you for letting me know.

Assuming you paid your house-for-rent with your own money: that you worked for, as opposed to won at the lottery or from previous investments. In a sense, the family that is giving you rent money is only paying your work back… until that point where you get your full ROI (cost of the house + your own work + interest).

Beyond that, the only reason they give you more rent money is because you own the house. But you got your ROI so by now they have paid for the house. And yet it's not theirs, so they still have to pay you. And when they do, any additional money you get, you basically took from them. As for your son, who presumably did not work for the house at all, will definitely take money from people through that house. Just because he had the right dad.

Don't get me wrong, you investing for your son and securing his future is you being a good dad. You just can't wave away how the current system works: people who own stuff have the power to take money from people who don't.

> people who own stuff have the power to take money from people who don't.

People who have invested capital, hedged risks, setup maintenance, did marketing etc.

Now we can agree that housing is very specific branch of economy where if you have upper hand(capital) you can be dealing cards to those who don't. There are ways to address that without the canvas of grand narratives(extracting labour etc).

If people do not "make" money (i.e. create value), how do you explain the increase in the standard of living over the last 100 years?

> how do you explain the increase in the standard of living over the last 100 years?

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.

And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.

> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

The ecocide which we've inflicted on the planet for the last 100 years will some day be seen for what it is - an atrocity.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.

You only see the curves go upward. But if you look very detailed, you see that a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.

When the going gets tough...

About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings.

Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little.

My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad now, because we are at a maximum.

> a plateau is coming. A downward trend will follow.

The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.

We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.

> people die from too much food than of too little.

We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.

It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.

These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...

> "make" money (i.e. create value)

See, the harmful confusion right there.

Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.

Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.

If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".

Another way to put it would be that the wealthiest people tend to own the assets that are creating lots of value. But owning is not the same thing as creating.

You’re absolutely right. David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” is a good take on this if one wants to start reading into it.

It seems to be that "bullshit jobs" isn't actually a good position for a leftist to take. You're basically saying workers don't do anything useful.

Even a more thought out form doesn't do anything class analysis didn't already do.

> You're basically saying workers don't do anything useful.

Not quite: bullshit jobs are when the workers themselves say their own job isn't doing anything useful. And apparently they comprise a sizeable portion of all workforce.

Of course, jobs people say are useless, jobs the workers themselves say are useless, and actually useless jobs, are 3 different sets. But I think we can confidently say something is wrong when so many workers say their own job is useless, even if they aren't: working a job you think is useless just isn't healthy.

This is what is known as "cope", ie, they don't feel emotionally satisfied.

Americans in particular always have pretty narcissistic ideas about what their jobs should be. You can see this from all the examples of hippies trying to start communes, which then fail because everyone appoints themselves official poet instead of farmworker.

> This is what is known as "cope", ie, they don't feel emotionally satisfied.

Yeah, I'm gonna need a citation for that one.

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

Many of us have the ability to entertain ourselves entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness.

Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?

There are cultures that don't use chairs.

The Japanese generally didn't use them (I think?) before they came into contact with European civilization.

I don't think any civilization could survive without entertainment though.

Many of us can sit on the ground or in a deep squat. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a book from nothingness.

sure, you can, many did, they are called authors

I did not say it was.

You can't rest your legs on an entertainment

Yet the entertainment I'm getting out of my chairs is limited.

But I think this is a false dichotomy: A comfortable armchair and a good book go well together.