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Comment by saubeidl | Hacker News Reader

>the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity

> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building

What you're describing is referenced to as Fictitious Capital in Marxist thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital

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Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.

Personally, I think it's better to normalize and point out there are a lot of valid points made.

But I suppose change needs both strategies.

Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.

In some of those circles, you can play a little game of using statements from Adam Smith, and seeing which ones draw knee-jeek criticism as "Marxist."

Same for Keynes.

Adam Smith had a bit of a Marxist view (though, he did come up with it first) on the land value of real property, considering deriving rent from it as "unearned" without labor, which looks a little too close to comfort to appealing to what we would call today the "labor theory of value" which we now know is a largely useless device for creating or observing markets intended to provide voluntary ~free exchange of the fruits of capital and labor.

Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.

Reading the Wikipedia article, it doesn't seem to fit at all, this concept is mainly about finance whereas here the money went into actual companies.

The AI companies really did spend every last cent (and more) of this capital.

"What you're describing is referenced to as Fictitious Capital in Classical Economics."

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