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Comment by sophrosyne42 | Hacker News Reader

"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers.

But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.

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> But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange

Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.

Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.

Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.

Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?

Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"?

The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.

This argument does not make any sense.

I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.

At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.

Then capitalism cannot exist and never has, because there is no such thing as something which produces wealth merely by possession. Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use. Without a use, there is no yield. Capital (in the sense of the monetary value of assets) is merely an index for the utility of assets in producing a yield. There is nothing special about the yield of capital; there is properly speaking no yield to capital at all, only a yield for the assets which the capital indexes. Entrepreneurs gain wealth by choosing which uses to put assets at their disposal. It is only when assets are put into production that they yield a profit or loss. And wealth accumulates only when there is sustainable profits. Mere posession would not involve exchange, let alone production, and therefore could not yield any profit. There is no "free" or "automatic" generation of income. It is the result of conscious activity on part of the owner, as is capital itself.

The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.

> Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use.

Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort and most importantly: the amount of money you can loan out (and make a profit from) is not limited by the number of hours in the day, and therefore owners can always out-compete laborers.

> The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets.

Now you're getting it!

> Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort

Money is a medium of exchange. It is used by exchanging it for something else. A loan involves trading money in the present, which is more valuable, for money in the future. What produces value here is surrendering present goods indirectly through the intermediary of money. The creditor gives up consumption so that others can consume or produce earlier than they otherwise could have in absence of the loan. This is the value produced by loans in the eyes of the debtor.

> Now you're getting it!

Notice how any market automatically involves said accounting immediately when money is used. Your earlier insistence that markets and capitalism are distinct cannot be maintained.

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