criticaljudge

Who is starving, and why? I think if you can point to some starving children and make a public call, you would get lots of donations. If you are aware of such cases, please point them out, or contact the appropriate charities.

Googling brought up this, which seems to confirm my hunch. People do know hunger, though. https://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-starve-to-death-eac...

The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.

"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.

The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.

I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.

As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).

Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?

You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.

Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.

You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.

Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.

And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.

In the latter case, the person who sold the castle can use the money to build a new castle.

Groceries salespeople are cheap because there are many people with the skills to do that job. The same does not go for brain surgery. And you can also sell groceries just fine when you are tired - a little slower perhaps, but nobody goes hungry.

The example may be extreme, but in general people pay other people in relation to how much the value or need their services. So it seems the brain surgeon is higher valued than the groceries person, simply because of supply and demand (many groceries people, few brain surgeons).

As for "deserving to live 20 minutes away from ones job", that is where it gets interesting.

Who, indeed, deserves to live in a good location? Good locations are not in unlimited supply. Who determines who gets the best spots?

What would be fair, according to the ubiquitous socialist crowd? First come, first serve? Poor people first? Lottery? Rich people first? Socialist who worked the hardest to bring about the socialist utopia first (that is usually what it ends up with, but I think not what the poor supporters of socialism envision)?

Personally I think by and large the market does get good results in that regard - the brain surgeons get to live in nice places, because of their merit. I prefer brain surgeons living in nice places to socialist activists living in nice places. Just my personal preference.

Well you have read the description of the poor in the 19th century, so I'd say it still doesn't compare. Nobody starves in the west, unless they have a serious mental illness. But then the comparison would also be silly, as their problem would not primarily "being poor", but having a mental illness. Of course you can always find somebody who is worse off than somebody else. Those starving people begging in the streets have it really well compared to somebody who is about to die from a terminal disease within the next 24 hours.

And if there is such a huge amount of people with mental illness, as I said elsewhere, I suspect the real problem is drug addiction and not "the economy" or "rich people".

They have their work power - don't banks actually love it when people can't pay off their debt?

If your odds of making your investment back are so bad that the bank won't give you a loan, maybe it is the wrong plan to begin with. The job of bankers in theory is to evaluate the risk of your plans and offer you credit accordingly. (Not that I claim they are all good at their job).

Children already start of pretty well in most parts of the world. Every child gets an education, for example.

I think you would find that to make everything equal, you would have to take children away from their parents at an early age. Because having caring, loving parents is also an advantage. At least so far not all kids in a school turn out the same, even thought they all have the same teachers and lessons. Must be the parents that make the difference.

I don't think that would be desirable. I don't want my children to be raised in a government institution to make them exactly the same as everybody else, just for the sake of an arbitrary metric ("equality" measured in some arbitrarily chosen terms).

In fact why not get rid of parents altogether, and create children in labs? I bet that is the socialist dream fulfilled.

You misunderstand the nature of money. Money means society owns something to the holder of the money. By not spending money, society is temporarily richer.

Also, sorry, but I don't care how productive other people's kids are, or "the economy". I care about the well-being of my kids. yes, I want everybody to be happy if possible, but my kids have priority to me.

And what exactly is "hypocritical"? What are you referring to? You assume everybody should have the same starting position in life, and I reject that notion.

Children of course are not at fault for the actions of their parents (like if they are drug addicts and have an unwanted child they can't afford, the child is not to blame - but neither are other people's children or parents). But that doesn't mean every child should automatically get the same "starting money". This is not a game of monopoly.

As I said - people compete to give their children the best odds. That is not even unique to humans, it is true for all of nature.

If you take that away, why bother with anything? Why should you bother to get a good job to be able to support your family? Just fuck and live the good life, and dump your children on society to be taken care of.

Already in the west everybody gets a pretty good deal in the form of an education.

Why don't parents who work hard to give their children a good live deserve to do so? It is not their fault if other people have children while they are poor.

Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?

You assume prices were merely driven by greedy landlords. That is of course untrue. Prices were driven up by the popularity of the city, with people seeking a place to rent outbidding each other and bidding prices up.

That demand will not simply go away, but newcomers will have to buy instead to rent. Or, there will be a huge black market. I've read an article about Stockholm were that seems to be what has happened.

A big irony is that the left who created the law has hurt some of their staunchest supporters, who did subsist by subletting their flats, which they had rented at old, low prices. That income is now also going away - it is not just "greedy rich speculators", but also transgender artists getting by on minimum income from subletting their flats whom they have hurt.

It is of course possible to lower prices by making the city less attractive. Socialism has succeeded in doing that already once, that is why Berlin was so cheap in the 90ies.

So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).

The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all.

You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.

"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."

Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?

The notion that children don't deserve the spoils of their parents is really crazy to me. Parents work so that they can give their children a better life. Heck, they even choose their partners to maximize odds for a better life for their offspring (wealth, good genes, and so on - it does not even depend on capitalism).

To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).

Sustainable resources? Food production relies heavily on fossil fuels, for example. But I suspect the same people who make that claim you make also make the claim that it would be easy to solve the climate crisis, we'd just have to act more sensibly.

Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.

I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.

Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.

Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?

I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.

Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).

In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.

Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".

If they print money, they devalue the money people already have, so in the end again it is the people, not "government", who pay.

You can't arbitrarily set rent prices. You can only ask what people are also willing to pay.

People are willing to pay because they have high paying jobs and want to live near to where they work. And that is ultimately also a good thing.

Think about a brain surgeon, who under socialism would have to commute for two hours to his jobs, and under evil capitalism can live 20 minutes from the hospital. Under capitalism he will get to the job well rested and therefore have a higher success rate for his operations.

Isn't that exactly what banks are for - so that you can get a loan? I would expect that you would qualify for a loan if you show evidence of your upcoming employment.

Many companies also pay for moves.

Of course if you do all that, and then your employment is suddenly canceled, you are stuck with some debt. I guess that happens to some people.

You can't deny that in terms of Bayesian probability, the odds are higher for a homeless person to be mentally unhinged than for the average person. Simply because mental illness is often the cause for homelessness.

Well arguably they are not really poor, compared to those cases of poverty in the 19th century.

I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

Then as I suspected, it is just mumbo jumpo to allow people to make demands (I created the "value", so I deserve that thing).

Again my question, what is the actual use for the concept? If you can not use it to determine price, what is it for?

And there are still examples that show how useless it is, like an apple has no value because it grows by itself? But apple juice (or sugar extracted from apples) has more value than an apple, because labor is used to extract it from apples? What possible use could be for that metric (and what is the unit of "value" - a vague feeling that stuff is owed to you?)? Even though the nutritious value of an apple is higher than apple juice or sugar?

Any pointers? I was under the impression that nobody besides socialists takes LTV serious anymore. And I gave some reasons why it doesn't make sense. I haven't heard any counterpoints that make me think investing more time into it would be worthwhile.

Edit: from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ) it seems quite a mess, perhaps a bit like planning economy where they add yet another equation to account for yet another problem, but they can never really capture it all. But at the end of the day, what is it useful for, other than making "worker demands"? Can you use it to compute anything useful? I highly doubt it. In another way it might just be saying "energy determines the price of everything", in archaic terms when energy was mostly "labor".

It seems much more practical and sensible to simply go with market prices.

Which one do you mean? It is true that owning stock does not entitle you to labor of a company of employees. Paying wages does.

And the "value theory of labor" states that the value of labor is determined by how hard the work is. So why should I not be paid for digging a hole in front of your door?

If you say you didn't want that hole to begin with, we are veering into "people should only pay for what they want", and I think the "value theory of labor" already gets in trouble. You have to admit that how much people want something, or how useful it is to them, should factor into how much they should have to pay somebody else. So the theory that only labor should determine the price is debunked.

"All value derives from labor" is not even true (what about trading rare items, for example - or lets take a house. Is a house by the lake the same value as a house on a garbage dump, because they both take the same amount of labor to build?), and it seems a very vague statement. How do you derive the value of something from that statement?

I certainly didn't want to suggest that P/E is a reliable or sufficient indicator for good investments. It was just about this claim that everything is just gambling at this point.

But I think the opposite case still kind of holds, that with P/E you can at least see if a company is most likely not overvalued. And that was the issue in question ("everything is just gambling").

Granted it was then perhaps a bad example, as it doesn't take into account the value of the companies possessions.

I just wanted to give an example to say that you can check things about a company beyond the stock price, which may be inflated by gambling. If a stock is "gambled" to the moon, it assume would have a very high P/E. I'm not actually an expert on those indicators, haven't looked into them much.