Hacker News Reader

Comment by mouse_ | Hacker News Reader

Capital (as in "money", not the means of production) is, boiled down, a means of social compulsion. I can compel a person to make me a sandwich with $10, and should they refuse very many times, they will be put into a position of jeopardy, with less access to food, shelter, medical services, hygiene, etc. In our culture, capital is like a whip to a horse and buggy.

Putting more capital into more people's pockets is like putting more whips into more people's hands. It does not address the root cause of the problem.

View on HN

this is not intuitive to me. In your description, it feels like capital more closely resembles carrots then whips?

also, the person's only source of wages isn't going to be specifically making sandwiches for just you, no?

Many obligations are dominated in local currency, as such, we must acquire local currency to discharge those obligations.

To a certain extent, being able to rent a flat that someone else has built is a carrot -- a luxury -- but to a certain extent, anti-vagrancy laws mean that there are whips -- consequences -- that I may incur but not having a flat. Social norms are constructed, but they are still real.

I should hope the average Joe is not viewed as a work mule to be compelled to action with whips and carrots.

Whip is a means of signaling and carrot has utility of it's own. That's an important distinction.

It’s an incentive to make a sandwich, not a compulsion. Get the level of the incentive right and you’ll get a sandwich.

Can civilization work without social compulsion? I think our fear that it can’t, or our belief that the only way to compel people is the threat of punishment, is what keeps these dynamics alive.

Compulsion is mandatory, but it can be majority structured as positive suasion and emphasizing the benefits of collaboration.

I reject the phrasing of the OP. It's not compulsion. As a human being, I need food, shelter, etc. to live. To acquire these things, I must labor. Where's the compulsion in that? This is a category mistake.

Compulsion is in the amount of labor you need to perform, because you have to provide for food, shelter, etc for yourself and also make sure the rich have the riches, military has fancy toys and billionaries can play in colonization of mars.

Plus "If we don’t do something about it we could lose democracy. We already are. "

I assume she is referring to the attempts to remove Donald Trump from various State ballots in 2024, making it harder for people who would have wanted to vote for him to do so. Not quite as far as happened in Romania of course.

There are very few MAGA communists, if any.

So, able-bodied people are entitled to freeload?

What a childish and ignorant comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com