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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Money is also a voting system. He can decide those things only because people voted for him with their money. The issue is, not everybody has same voting power in this system. But then again people who have more power were voted for previously by others. So it's kind of representative democracy.

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Compounding interest means, left unchecked, the natural progression is the “voting” power concentrated until there is only a monarch.

A trillion dollars will accumulate $100 billion in passive wealth simply by existing

Compounding interest just skewes the balance so that being voted for earlier is worth more than being voted for later.

I'm not saying it's a good system, but it's "aiming" for realtively good things. Just needs a bit of rebalancing regarding what activities help people get voted for. Basically harm shouldn't pay, squatting on limited resources shouldn't pay.

Compounding interest means assets are accumulated and concentrated. At a certain point a tipping point is reached a it’s no longer possible to buy assets. No Russian serf was ever going to have upwards mobility.

Sure. But that's the result of the fact that the way money is set up, it "likes" if you acquired it earlier rather than later.

Let's naively assume that money is a reward for doing a good thing. It might be beneficial to more highly reward people who did the good thing sooner rather than later. So it's a reasonable mechanism having undesirable side effects because it's not tuned correctly.

Good, god, no, money represents the balance of power in a system, there's not thing 'representative' about it from a civic perspective, completely the opposite.

If you give your money to someone else you are giving them power. And people in power are going to represent you in context of decision making. Regardless of how well they do it.

Money represents a social IOU. The more money you have, the more value you have provided to society and thus you hold IOUs for which society will pay you back in the future.

That's why it's silly to hold a lot of cash, it means you've been suckered by society. That's also why holding (certain kinds of) debt is smart; you want a net positive relationship with society, in terms of pure personal gain.

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